President Lee Jae-myung left for the United States to attend the UN General Assembly. He is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the high-level session in New York, with bilateral meetings being arranged with several heads of state.

Over the same days Foreign Minister Cho Hyun attended the trilateral foreign ministers' meeting with the United States and Japan in New York. The foreign ministry has said contacts at leader level remain under coordination.

The focus is whether a meeting with President Trump takes place. With President Xi Jinping's visit to Washington imminent, a meeting on the margins of the General Assembly would likely take in both trade and security matters.

Diplomacy Outside the Hall

The real stage of the high-level session is often not the speeches but the bilateral and minilateral contacts around them, since dozens of heads of state and foreign ministers occupy the same city for a week.

New York this week has hosted, in quick succession, the signing of the US-Denmark-Greenland security agreement, US-China economic talks, a US-Japan leaders' meeting and the trilateral foreign ministers' meeting. Several negotiating tables run at once in one city.

Domestically the trip follows polling showing the president's approval rating halting a ten-week slide. Discussion of a reshuffle among presidential staff is also under way.

The content of the keynote address is itself of interest. The South Korean government has put climate, development cooperation and artificial-intelligence governance forward as its priorities in multilateral settings.