WASHINGTON (Yonhap) -- Apparently struggling to distance itself from a sharp territorial tension between its top Asian allies, the United States said Monday that it had not received any prior notice from South Korea on President Lee Myung-bak's trip to Dokdo, a set of islets controlled by Seoul but also claimed by Tokyo.
"With regard to whether we had any advance notice of the visit, I don't think so," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.
She was responding to a question at a daily press briefing about whether the U.S. was notified of Lee's visit in advance and tried to block it.
The South Korean leader made a landmark tour of Dokdo in the East Sea between Korea and Japan last week.
Lee became the first South Korean president to visit the islets, a source of decades-long diplomatic disputes between Seoul and Tokyo as a legacy of Japan's colonial rule of Korea from 1910 to 1945.
Nuland reiterated that the U.S. takes no position on this territorial spat.
"We want to see our two strong Pacific allies work this out together and work it out through a consensus," she added. (Yonhap)