South Korean President Park Geun-hye arrived in New York on Sunday on the first stop of a visit to the United States that will culminate in a summit with President Barack Obama expected focus on how to deal with North Korea.

The White House summit, scheduled for Tuesday, could also take up contentious bilateral issues as well, such as Seoul's demand for the right to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, and set the tone for how the alliance between the two countries will fare for years to come.

Park first stopped in New York for a meeting with South Korean residents here set for later in the day and talks on Monday with South Korean-born U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. She will then head to Washington for a summit with Obama and a speech at a joint session of Congress.

The summit comes as North Korea has toned down war rhetoric and begun talking about the possibility of dialogue with Washington after weeks of nuclear strike threats and other menacing bombast against South Korea and the United States.

But in inter-Korean relations, no signs of a breakthrough are in sight as Pyongyang has spurned Seoul's calls for talks about saving the suspended joint industrial complex in its border city of Kaesong from permanent closure.

Park and Obama are expected to use the summit to try to forge a united front on the North.

They plan to issue a joint declaration laying out a vision for moving the alliance between the two countries forward on the occasion of its 60th anniversary. They are also expected to reaffirm their principle that a nuclear North Korea is unacceptable and they won't reward North Korea's bad behavior, officials said.

Since taking office in February, Park has maintained a two-track approach to Pyongyang. Under what is dubbed the "Korean Peninsula trust process," she has pledged strong retaliation against any provocations while also calling for dialogue and exchanges to foster trust and reduce tensions.

Park has said repeatedly that a nuclear-armed North Korea can never be tolerated. Still, she also pledged not to link humanitarian aid for the impoverished North to security issues, a departure from her predecessor Lee Myung-bak, who insisted on liking any assistance to progress in disarming the North.

The U.S. has taken a tougher line, demanding Pyongyang first demonstrate its commitment to disarm if it wants dialogue.

In a joint statement issued when Secretary of State John Kerry visited Seoul last month, South Korea and the U.S. said the North "must prove its seriousness by taking meaningful steps to abide by its international obligations."

North Korea has since said that it is "not opposed to dialogue but has no idea of sitting at the humiliating negotiating table with the party brandishing a nuclear stick." Pyongyang has long accused Washington of threatening to attack it with nuclear weapons.

In what was seen as an attempt to coax the U.S. into dialogue, North Korea sentenced a Korean-American man, Kenneth Bae, to 15 years of hard labor Thursday. Bae, whose Korean name is Bae Joon-ho, was arrested in North Korea in November on charges of unspecified anti-state crimes.

Bae is the sixth American citizen to be detained by the North since 2009. All previous detainees were released, some of them after involvement by high-profile people like former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Analysts say Pyongyang appears to be using the case as leverage to open dialogue.

How much Obama will embrace Park's trustpolitik is also a focus of attention.

In the joint statement issued during Kerry's trip, the U.S. said it "welcomes" the approach, but stopped short of expressing full "support," though Kerry praised her vision for peace on the Korean Peninsula as "terrific" during a news conference.

Other topics that could be on the agenda include South Korea's demand for the right to reprocess spent fuel and enrich uranium for atomic power plants. Seoul has no such rights under a 1974 bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation deal with Washington.

The U.S. has been reluctant to accept the demand because of proliferation concerns.

Since 2010, the two sides have had negotiations on rewriting the accord, set to expire in March next year, but have so far failed to find a compromise. They settled last month on a two-year extension of the existing deal, a stopgap measure aimed at buying time for more negotiations.

A day after the summit, Park is scheduled to deliver a speech at a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

She will be the sixth South Korean president to do so. Officials said it is quite unusual for a foreign leader to make such a speech during an "official visit," instead of a more formal "state visit."

During the speech, Park plans to mainly touch on the 60 years of the alliance, outline how much South Korea has developed in political, economic, social and cultural aspects so far, and put forward her visions about North Korea, peace and cooperation in Northeast Asia, officials said.

Park said last month that she will unveil her "Northeast Asia peace initiative," or "Seoul process" for short, during the visit to the U.S. in an effort to help promote peace and reconciliation in a region fraught with tensions over history and territorial rows.

The idea calls for Asian nations to enhance cooperation, first on non-political issues such as climate change and terrorism prevention, before expanding the trust built through such cooperation to other areas. It appears to be a broader version of Park's "Korean Peninsula trust proces."

The Congress speech comes only a year and a half after her predecessor Lee did so in 2011. Lee was the last foreign leader to deliver such an address, and it would be the first time since 1945 for leaders of the same country to address a joint U.S. congressional session in a row, officials said.

Accompanying Park will be a massive 51-member delegation of South Korean business leaders, including such top tycoons as Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee, Hyundai Motor Chairman Chung Mong-koo, LG Chairman Koo Bon-moo and POSCO Chairman Chung Joon-yang.

It will be one of the largest business delegations ever to accompany a presidential trip. They plan to attend a dinner reception marking the 60th anniversary of the South Korea-U.S. alliance and a business round-table meeting hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

On the way home, Park plans to stop in Los Angeles for a meeting with the city's mayor and a meeting with South Korean information technology (IT) business leaders there before returning to Seoul on May 10.

The meeting with IT leaders is aimed at promoting her trademark "creative economy" policy that calls for creating innovative business opportunities and more jobs by mixing information and communications technologies with other industries and cultural sectors. (Yonhap News)