- SEOUL: US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is meeting in Seoul with top South Korean leaders to offer reassurances of American support and security cooperation against the threat of attack by communist North Korea.
The talks, on Panetta’s first trip to Asia as Pentagon chief, are part of a broader Obama administration effort to shore up South Korean confidence in a military alliance that has endured for six decades.
Panetta has called the North “reckless” and a “serious threat” to peace on the Korean peninsula, which exploded in war in 1950 and drew the US and other nations into a bloody three-year conflict against the North and China.
Separately, the State Department’s top Asia policy official, Kurt Campbell, was in Seoul to brief officials on this week’s US-North Korea talks in Geneva.
