WSJ: ROK-U.S. FTA to Die a Quiet Death

If the Wall Street Journal says the FTA is now dead, it must be so:

Only two months after pressuring Seoul to insert labor and environmental concessions, House Democrats now say they won’t approve the FTA in any case. [WSJ]

But if the WSJ says “House Democrats” say it, is it necessarily so?

This news reaches us via Brendan Carr, whose post on the subject will do just as well if you’re not a WSJ subscriber. His blog is a funny and interesting read, and I admire him for his straightforward language (a good quality to look for in a lawyer, I will add). That said, if the FTA really is dead, the Joongang Ilbo hasn’t caught on (hat tip to Brendan’s commenter Sperwer).

OFK readers will recall that I first predicted the FTA’s death, more prematurely than presciently, on previous occasions. The first was in April of 2006, and the second was in this April 2007 post. The same day as the April 2007 post, the two countries’s negotiators cut through a year of wide and seemingly inflexible differences and reached a draft agreement. They did this after I had posted a long chronology of the ugly history of the negotiations and the campaign of anti-FTA/anti-U.S. distortion and demogoguery in Korea, and reasoned that the Korean government had done so little to defend the FTA or explain its potential benefits that it had no room to negotiate or compromise on issues that were essential to the U.S. side. I believed that as a result, the FTA would fail, and that the attempt would actually leave relations between the two countries in a worse state than before. Having failed to answer its own far-left base and unwilling to risk its anti-U.S. voter appeal, Roh’s government had walled itself into taking unreasonable positions that I thought the U.S. side would never accept. Based on the comments I’d seen coming from the U.S. Trade Representative and her negotiating team, I didn’t think we’d cave. I was wrong. We did cave.

The patient lived, but so did the tumor, and that same bad deal now went to a hostile Congress.

The words that deserve to be remembered here were those of former congressman James Leach, who diplomatically predicted both the transfer of power in Congress last November, and that the FTA would have to pass in a Republican Congress or not at all (the second bullet of my “random observations” of this hearing was based on Leach’s comments). And sure enough, the deal ran into immediate trouble in Congress, even though the draft was signed while Congress was in recess. This led to my third prediction of the FTA’s death, which I’m relieved to report is holding up. So far.

I assume that like drunken Irish wakes, blogs are places where one’s true feelings about the deceased can be spoken. Mine are that although this is a lost opportunity in many ways, I’m still glad this particular FTA deal failed. First, remember that this deal could have passed, even in this Congress, had it been more even-handed and had “outward processing zones” (read: Kaesong) not been sitting there in Annex 22-C screaming “slave labor!” I should say that well-informed friends tell me that this would never happen, and that Annex 22-C was just token language we agreed to to shut the South Koreans up. I answer them by saying that none of us thought we’d ever launder $25 million in Kim Jong Il’s drug and counterfeiting money for him this time last year. I know what the law says about importing slave-made goods, but I’ve lost my trust in this administration (or future ones) not to exempt North Korea from every law of God or man. Second, after Roh’s miserable stewardship of these negotiations — and, for that matter, the entire U.S.-ROK relationship — this is not a deal he deserved to bring home. , I don’t believe that anti-Americanism should be cost-free, and that when self-described allies encourage or fail to respond to it, we shouldn’t reward them, treat them like allies, or help them argue to their voters that theirs is the most profitable way of dealing with America.

In the end, however, a ROK-U.S. FTA on the right terms serves the economic and diplomatic interests of both countries, if nothing else because it could serve as a counterweight to the growing influence of China over the South Korean economy. Maybe next year.