South Korea's recently elected president, Moon Jae-in, has arrived in the United States for an official visit. President Moon took office last month because his predecessor, Park Geun-hye, was impeached due to bribery and influence-peddling charges.
Moon and President Trump are discussing important international security issues such as North Korea and China, including the deployment of American Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-ballistic missile defense systems in South Korea.
They are also discussing the Park Administration's apparent failure to follow the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and its ostensible abuse of administrative agency power to intentionally impair American companies. These trade and economic topics are important to both presidents.
They are important to President Trump, because during the 2016 campaign, he repeatedly expressed his willingness to renegotiate or even terminate/exit trade agreements under certain circumstances — when the other signatory countries weren't living up to their commitments, or when the deals were just plain bad for the U.S. and U.S. workers. This past April, President Trump criticized KORUS. This year marks a review period to potentially renegotiate or ratify a new version of KORUS. In fact, in December 2011, Trump presciently chastised the Obama Administration's ineffective renegotiation of KORUS.
These topics are important to President Moon because, politically, he needs to clearly distinguish and wall-off his administration from the misconduct of his predecessor's administration. Moreover, in the past, President Moon has held himself out as a reformer of the chaebol (literally, "wealth clan") system. A chaebol is a huge, dominant conglomerate, such as Samsung and Hyundai, which has close ties to — and enormous influence over — the South Korean government.
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01.18.2025