SEOUL, South Korea — En route to his first summit with President Trump, South Korea's president has pushed back against U.S. pressure to refocus his country's 71-year-old military alliance with the U.S. away from deterring North Korea and toward countering China.

"This is not an issue we can easily agree with," Lee Jae-myung told reporters during his flight to Washington, D.C., hinting at the challenges waiting for him at the White House.

The Trump administration is calling for modernizing the 71-year-old U.S.-South Korea alliance, forged in the wake of the Korean War.

The U.S. has some 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea. For about two decades, it has called for " strategic flexibility " to deploy them to meet security challenges away from the Korean Peninsula. And it wants So

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