Koreans's beef with U.S. beef plus Obama's letter to Bush may kill FTA with Seoul
Thursday, June 5, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON — Sen. Jim Webb views with "skepticism" the free-trade agreement (FTA) worked out by United States and South Korean negotiators in talks that dragged on for nearly a year and a half. He doubts, however, if he'll have to decide whether or not to vote on it.
"Will it ever come up for a vote?" the Virginia Democrat, a much-decorated Vietnam War veteran and author of several novels, shot back rhetorically when asked if he'd vote for or against the free-trade agreement's ratification by the US Congress.
Webb's response, as he signed copies of his latest book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, at the National Press Club, pointed to the increasingly dim prospects for a deal touted by South Korean and American leaders as sure to result in a vast increase in two-way trade.
Opposition to the agreement has been coalescing in the U.S. Congress while protests in South Korea against the import of U.S. beef make the agreement's chances all the less likely to win approval in South Korea's fractious National Assembly. South Korea has banned U.S. beef ever since the discovery of mad cow disease in one American animal in 2003.
The protests in South Korea have forced the government of the conservative Lee Myung-bak, inaugurated as president 100 days ago, first to postpone the import of U.S. beef and then to agree not to import beef from cows more than 30 months old. Lee's critics charge that he agreed with unseemly haste to bow to U.S. demands for opening up to U.S. beef after repeated reminders from American diplomats that the FTA had no chance of ratification by Congress if U.S. beef were still excluded.
The crisis confronting the Lee government over U.S. beef collides with the assumption by the U.S. administration that somehow South Korea would live up to the beef agreement hammered out in April and the protests would die down. Even if that assumption eventually proves correct, adherence by South Korea to the beef deal is no guarantee of ratification of the FTA by the U.S. Congress.
The anti-beef, anti-FTA protest, rising in intensity over the past month, comes as a shock to South Korean and American officials, caught by surprise just as they believed U.S.-Korean relations were improving after strains under the two presidents who ruled for a decade before Lee's landslide election victory in December.
When Lee flew to the U.S. to meet President George W Bush at Camp David hours after negotiators had come to terms on beef, he did so with a sense of relief. That critical issue appeared to have been resolved so the two leaders could go on to talk about strengthening the U.S.-South Korean alliance and coordinating efforts to get North Korea to give up its nuclear program.
It's possible that North Korea will present a compromise declaration that avoids direct acknowledgement of its enriched uranium program while the U.S. takes steps to lift economic sanctions and remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. U.S. beef and the FTA, however, are far more emotional issues on the streets of Seoul, just as loss of jobs, for whatever reason, is an emotional issue in the U.S.
Indeed, the sense in Washington is that the Congress will either vote against ratifying the agreement or will simply not vote on it at all. Bush has yet to send it to Congress for ratification, and he's getting advice on all sides to drop it, to let it slide into the next administration.
The prospects for the FTA suffered a severe blow last month when Barack Obama, the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, wrote to Bush saying the FTA is "badly flawed" and advising him not to ask Congress to vote on it. Obama, reflecting complaints from the U.S. motor vehicle industry, said the deal "would give Korean exports essentially unfettered access to the U.S. market and would eliminate our best opportunity for obtaining genuinely reciprocal market access in one of the world's largest economies".
Larry Niksch, Asia specialist at the Congressional Research Service, believes Obama's position means the free-trade agreement has "no chance" in the U.S. Congress while Bush is in office. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama's opponent for the Democratic nomination, has already voiced her strenuous opposition.
For Obama as well as Clinton, opposition to the FTA fits in with their populist strategy for winning votes among workers fearful of losing still more jobs while the economy sinks into a recession characterized by rising prices, mounting bankruptcies and the loss of homes in a mortgage crisis.
Niksch noted, however, that Obama "keeps the door open to do something about the agreement but probably in a modified way" if he is elected president.
Obama, said Niksch, may want to include rice in a revised FTA, even though rice is such an emotional issue in South Korea that it's not covered at all in the current FTA. Obama may have had rice in mind when he said in his letter to Bush that the FTA as it now stands "would reinforce the sense that our trade policy does not adequately reflect manufacturing and agricultural exports".
In other words, like it or not, U.S. and South Korean negotiators may be in for another year of hard wheeling and dealing when the next U.S. administration takes office. John McCain, certain to win the Republican nomination, has endorsed the FTA in its present form, but will have to deal with a Democrat-controlled Congress that is going to demand substantial revisions.
Victor Cha, who served for nearly three years as director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, believes the only way for the FTA to make it through Congress is for Bush to go "on the offensive" when and if the FTA is approved by South Korea's National Assembly.
Bush, said Cha, now director of Asian studies at Georgetown University, needs to get across to recalcitrant members of Congress that "this is not just about a trade relationship". Congress has to understand, "If we don't do this, China and the European Union will begin to make FTAs that exclude us." If the FTA "becomes a high-profile issue, then it will work", said Cha. "Everyone agrees this is a shining example of an FTA that benefits both sides."
That argument, however, leads advocates of the FTA to believe that the agreement is too important to jeopardize by a premature congressional debate that might kill it off. Thus Donald Gross, adjunct fellow of the Pacific Forum of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes "the best course would be if the current U.S. administration were to hold off" on pressing for passage of the deal.
Gross believes that the FTA's "flaming defeat" in Congress would be "very painful for the whole relationship" between the U.S. and South Korea. "My personal hope," he said, "is for it not to be submitted to the U.S. Congress."
The fact is, to Americans, the anti-beef protests are a secondary irritant, background noise that hardly makes it into the media. In any case, said Niksch at the Congressional Research Service, it may be too late now for Congress to have time to debate and vote on the FTA.
"If Bush doesn't send it to Congress in the next few days, Congress won't have enough time to give it full consideration," he said. "It's important the Koreans understand the situation and not be too optimistic."