Seoul's foreign ministry moved Tuesday to reaffirm that South Korea and the United States remain jointly committed to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, after neither country's official summary of a phone call between Foreign Minister Cho Hyun and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio explicitly used the term. The South Korean ministry acknowledged that its own press release had referred only to "the resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue," while the US State Department's readout made no mention of North Korea's nuclear programme at all. The clarification comes amid growing scrutiny of the Trump administration's approach to Pyongyang, with President Donald Trump signalling a desire to re-engage with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, declining to confirm denuclearization as his stated objective, and having recently scaled back joint US–South Korea military exercises in what analysts view as a conciliatory gesture toward the North.