Korean leader in US to celebrate trade pact

Washington DC was aflutter with South Korean flags on Wednesday as President Lee Myung-bak began a state visit to the US, the highest honour a foreign leader can receive from the White House.

In addition to being hosted at a state dinner at the White House tonight, Mr Lee will address a joint session of Congress on Thursday before heading to Michigan on Friday with President Barack Obama to visit a General Motors assembly plant.

The extensive programme is a sign of the unusually close relationship between the two presidents, the result both of personal chemistry and of South Korea’s support for the US on everything from climate change to Afghanistan.

“The relationship today is extremely close,” says Victor Cha, a Georgetown University professor and a former Korea adviser to President George W. Bush. “It’s probably at one of its highest points, if not the highest point in the history of US-Korea relations.”

This is a sharp turnround from a few years ago, when Mr Lee’s predecessor, leftist Roh Moo-hyun, prided himself on taking a tough stance against the US. This – combined with the upheaval in Japan, which has had six prime ministers in five years – has made South Korea the US’s strongest ally in Asia.

Mr Lee can take the credit for much of this improvement, said Christopher Hill, a former US ambassador to Seoul.

“Both President Bush and President Obama were very impressed with Korea’s success and this has become the model for the Obama administration on everything from education to infrastructure,” Mr Hill said.

Under Mr Lee, South Korea has supported the US in Afghanistan, providing a provincial reconstruction team, and contributed military assets for anti-piracy campaigns.

The two have also marched in step on North Korea, partly because of Pyongyang’s incendiary behaviour – its missile and nuclear tests in 2009 and the attacks on a South Korean naval ship that killed 46 sailors have worked to bring the governments together.

The agenda for Thursday’s meetings will include how to deal with North Korea, the relocation of the Yongsan military base in Seoul and the transition of operational control in wartime to Korea. But the main focus will be a celebration of the US Congress’s long-awaited approval of a bilateral trade agreement between the countries.

The agreement, which will be the US’s biggest since the North American Free Trade Agreement almost two decades ago, was first concluded in 2007 but had become mired in the American political process and had to be renegotiated.

It was expected to be passed by Congress on Wednesday.

With Mr Lee’s term as president coming to an end next year, the bilateral trade agreement offers a mechanism to “bolt down” the strong relationship, analysts said, while noting that it remains prone to the whims of volatile public opinion in South Korea.

It would provide “a process for integrating our economies and resolving disputes”, said Michael Green, a former Bush adviser now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Changes in the security arrangement, notably the transfer of wartime operational command, would also help “refine and revise and work on the alliance”, even with political change, he said.

The fly in the ointment is the US Congress’s delay in confirming the appointment of Sung Kim as the new ambassador to Seoul. He would become the first Korean-American to hold the post but his confirmation has been delayed because of unrelated political reasons.