President Moon Jae-in said Tuesday that a unified and cool-headed response by South Korea and the United States to North Korea’s recent missile firing has helped maintain the momentum of dialogue. In a luncheon meeting with top military commanders of the allies at Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul, the president also cited “personal trust” between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and a summit-led change in regional security conditions. “I think that the firmness of the South Korea-U.S. alliance and close coordination between the two nations have quite shined in their response to North Korea’s launches of projectiles,” he said. Referring to some of the projectiles in Korean, he used an ambiguous expression that could be heard as “dando (ballistic),” but his office, Cheong Wa Dae, later said he meant “dangeori (short-range).”

On the basis of a prepared text of Moon’s opening statement, in fact, his translator used the words “short-range missile.”  Cheong Wa Dae’s formal stance is that the allies are still analyzing the exact types of projectiles that the secretive communist nation fired earlier this month. A ballistic missile launch by the North would constitute a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Moon added that Seoul and Washington have kept the dialogue momentum alive by responding to Pyongyang’s behavior in a “calm and moderate” voice. He emphasized the importance of the alliance in the peace-building process on the peninsula. “Even if peace is established on the Korean Peninsula with the power of the South Korea-U.S. alliance, the role of the alliance will remain important in the peace and stability of all of Northeast Asia,” Moon said.