President Bush travels to Kosovo today to meet US peacekeeping troops and urge NATO partners to work toward a timely exit for all peacekeepers.
"The president wants to thank our troops for their service there," US national security adviser spokeswoman Ms Condoleezza Rice said.
President Bush yesterday repeated his promise not to pull US forces out of the Balkans unilaterally. This pledge has reassured European leaders concerned about campaign statements questioning US peacekeeping involvement.
"Americans came into the Balkans with our friends and we will leave with our friends," Mr Bush said. But a senior US official said Mr Bush would refer to the eventual goal of withdrawing the forces when the Balkans are stable.
"We will go out together, but the other part of that point, which sometimes gets forgotten here in Europe, is that we want to hasten the day when we'll go out together by building democratic institutions by deploying civil police and so forth," the official said.
Mr Bush is to visit Camp Bondsteel, headquarters ofUS peacekeeping operations in the southern Serbian province. US soldiers comprise about 6,000 of the 42,000 troops from 30 countries serving in the NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping operations.
Kosovo has been under UN administration since the 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia to halt oppression of ethnic Albanians by Serb forces.
President Bush is to return to Rome from Kosovo and then fly home to Washington after his seven-day trip to Europe.