WASHINGTON, March 21 (UPI) -- President Barack Obama's planned visit to the Korean Demilitarized Zone will support U.S. troops and fortify U.S.-South Korean relations, the White House said.
"The DMZ is the front line of democracy in the Korean Peninsula, and it's the symbol of the U.S. and [South Korean] resolve, as well as solidarity," Daniel Russel, Asia director for the White House National Security Council, said in a press briefing Tuesday.
"So a visit by the president there to see and to thank the U.S. and the South Korean service members makes perfect sense," he said.
Sunday's trip to the world's most heavily militarized border, ahead of an international nuclear security summit with more than 50 nations in Seoul, comes two years after a South Korean naval ship sank near the disputed maritime border with North Korea, the White House said. It would also follow Friday's announcement by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's regime that Pyongyang planned to launch a satellite into orbit next month.
The United States and other countries condemned the move, saying it would violate U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding North Korea stop launching rockets that use long-range intercontinental ballistic missile technology, like the one that would carry the satellite into space.
Washington and the Security Council have condemned such launches as a cover for developing missiles that could be used to deliver nuclear weapons. Obama said a U.S. offer of food aid could be jeopardized if the North proceeds with the launch.
The administration pledged to ship tons of food aid to the isolated, impoverished nation after North Korea announced Feb. 29 it would suspend its nuclear-weapons tests and uranium enrichment and let international inspectors monitor activities at its main nuclear complex.
North Korea had no immediate comment on Obama's visit to the DMZ, a 160-mile long, 2.5-mile wide strip of land surrounded by barbed wire and minefields that cuts the Korean Peninsula roughly in half and serves as a buffer zone between the two countries -- which remain technically at war, even though an armistice agreement was signed in 1953.
The United States has 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea.
The visit will be Obama's third to South Korea but his first to the DMZ. Former President George W. Bush visited the DMZ in 2002, his predecessor Bill Clinton visited in 1993 and former President Ronald Reagan made the trip in 1983.
Clinton called it "the scariest place on Earth."
On the sidelines of next week's summit Obama plans to meet Monday and Tuesday with Chinese President Hu Jintao, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the White House said.
