<%@LANGUAGE="VBSCRIPT" CODEPAGE="1252"%> WorldTribune.com: Mobile — Obama returned calls from nine heads of state
Obama returned calls from nine heads of state

Sunday, November 9, 2008 Free Headline Alerts

By Donald Kirk

SEOUL — The United States president-elect Barack Obama got many congratulatory calls from heads of state this week.

Among the calls he returned was one from South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak who is concerned about the Korea-U.S. free-trade agreement (FTA). The other return calls were made to the leaders of Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Japan and Mexico.

Obama, during his campaign, strongly opposed the FTA as a threat to Michigan motor vehicle workers. Obama's position puts him at direct odds with South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak, who is pressing hard for approval of the deal by South Korea's fractious National Assembly.

At his end of the line, Obama assured Lee that he was "a great admirer of South Korea and its people". Lee at the other end happily went along with Obama's call for improving the U.S.-Korean alliance, cooperating on the six-party talks on North Korea's nukes and working to resolve the global financial crisis.

In a society that places much emphasis on symbolic gestures, the chit-chat was probably not a waste of time. Obama had paid respect by including Lee among the first nine heads of state on whom he bestowed the honor of a call in response to their congratulatory wishes. Still, the Obama-Lee telephone dialogue did not just leave the difficult issues for later; it completely ignored them.

If the conversation were to have had any substantive meaning, Obama might have asked Lee what his trade minister, Kim Jong-hoon, was talking about when he blamed the enormous disparity between the number of Korean cars sold in the U.S. and that of American cars sold in Korea on the U.S. motor vehicle industry.

Obama might also have been curious enough to ask whether the trade minister was totally serious or just bluffing when he said flatly, "There will be no new negotiation" on the FTA, worked out in 16 months of harrowing talks during the administration of Lee's predecessor, Roh Mo-hyun.

For that matter, Lee might have asked Obama what he was thinking when he seemed to have climbed down from his strenuous opposition to the FTA, as expressed in his campaign, and now might go along, but only if American vehicles had greater access to the Korean market.

As of now, the gap in motor vehicle sales in each other's markets is so huge that the odds on bringing the numbers much closer together are probably worse, if that is possible, than the chances of North Korea abandoning its nuclear weapons program.

After years of American complaining, U.S. manufacturers sold 6,235 cars in South Korea last year, compared with 777,482 cars exported to the U.S. — and that statistic does not include more than 200,000 Hyundai sedans and SUVs produced at its plant in Montgomery, Alabama.

Even if Korea and the U.S. gradually remove the tariffs as specified in the agreement, American motor vehicle manufacturers, and labor unions, are sure that multiple non-tariff barriers will conspire to keep American imports at the same fairly low level. The only beneficiary, they believe, will be the Korean motor vehicle industry, which will be able to export even more vehicles to the U.S. under the terms of the deal — even more than initially expected as a result of the sunken value of the Korean won against the dollar.

American negotiators, with the full backing of President George W. Bush, believe the agreement is broad enough to bring about a significant increase in the export of other products to Korea. The rapid expansion of trade, they are convinced, will make the FTA "a win-win" situation, as they are fond of saying, for both sides.

If Obama sticks to his guns, though, debate on the FTA could sour Korean-American relations as surely as did the reluctance of Bush, in his first term, to negotiate with North Korea. Lee sees the agreement as all the more important as Korea's economy, including its stock market, sags in tandem with that of other Asian economies.

Nor is the FTA the only stumbling block. Lee and Obama do not necessarily see eye-to-eye on North Korea, despite their pledge to cooperate on the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program.

The concern here is that Obama will be more likely than was Bush in his second term to make concessions to North Korea for the sake of an appearance of carrying out the terms of agreements reached on Feb. 13, 2007, and Oct. 3, 2007.

Obama's declarations of willingness to meet with North Korea's Kim Jong-Il, among other leaders hostile toward the U.S., raise the question as to whether he will go along with North Korean demands for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea and a peace treaty that excludes South Korea. President Bill Clinton, in the waning month or two of his presidency before Bush's inauguration in January 2001, was tempted to go to North Korea, but held off during the Florida "recount" of votes that gave Bush the victory over Clinton's vice president Al Gore.

North Korea's denunciations of Lee for insisting on full "verification" of North Korean claims to be doing away with its nuclear program heighten fears that the North will succeed in its long-term strategy of splitting the alliance between South Korea and the U.S.

Neither Lee nor Obama got into these uncomfortable issues in their conversation. Nor did they talk about North Korea's assault on the human rights of its own people. That topic was always avoided by Lee's two presidential predecessors, Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Dae-jung, and has been taboo in the six-party talks, but Lee has outraged North Korea by promising to make it an issue.

In view of the uncertain health of Kim Jong-Il, though, some analysts believe Obama and Lee should be discussing how to respond after he leaves the scene. North Korean reports of public appearances by Kim Jong-Il, most recently at a concert in Pyongyang by a state opera group, have not removed the view that he suffered a stroke in August and may be partially paralyzed.

Victor Cha, former Asia director of the National Security Council staff in the Bush administration, visiting Seoul, called for "quiet but serious discussion about how to prepare for sudden change in North Korea".

Cha, now a professor at Georgetown University, said talk on that topic got nowhere while Roh was president in view of fears that North Korea would see it as part of a plot to bring about "collapse of the regime". Now, he said, "such planning needs to be restarted in earnest and in depth".

For now, however, the economy takes precedence. Lee goes to Washington for the Group of 20 meeting on financial problems on Nov. 15. Obama will be there, even as Bush savors his last big show on the world stage. Obama and Lee are likely to meet, if briefly, on the sidelines — another chance for them to sound each other out on the FTA.

As for North Korea's nukes, they will leave that topic up to diplomats negotiating the next round of six-party talks. Verification of North Korea's compliance with the nuclear deal can wait, as it has for years. Votes on the FTA — in the U.S. Congress and Korea's National Assembly — could happen before Obama takes office in January.

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