South Korea’s President Wants U.S. to Ease the Way for Talks With North

SEOUL—South Korea’s leader urged the U.S. to ease preconditions for talks with North Korea, as the left-leaning administration in Seoul sought to extend an Olympics-driven rapprochement with Pyongyang and head off the possibility of a new flare-up.

President Moon Jae-in said in a meeting on Monday with a special envoy of Chinese President Xi Jinping that “the U.S. needed to lower the threshold for dialogue” and that Pyongyang should show a willingness to denuclearize, according to a spokesman for Seoul’s presidential Blue...