Obama Presses to Complete Free-Trade Deal With South Korea

The agreement was signed in 2007 but requires approval by Congress, where Democrats have said they will not support it unless barriers to American exports of automobiles and beef are further reduced.

On Monday, the United States trade representative, Ron Kirk, and his Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-hoon, met in Seoul, where their aides have been in face-to-face talks since last week.

And as part of his 10-day trip to Asia, President Obama is scheduled to arrive in Seoul on Thursday to meet with President Lee Myung-bak and attend a two-day meeting with other leaders of the Group of 20 economic powers.

“Hopefully, by the time he comes we will have an agreement,” Mr. Lee said in an interview Saturday in Seoul. “We will send a very powerful and strong message about maintaining open markets and resist the trend toward protectionism.”

Mr. Lee said the agreement would help cement the 60-year-old alliance between the countries.

At the last G-20 leaders’ meeting, held in Toronto in June, Mr. Obama announced a goal of completing the agreement by the Seoul meeting and submitting it to Congress early next year. Mr. Obama, who was critical of such trade agreements when he ran for office, stopped short of calling for the deal to be renegotiated, but called for adjustments in areas like the auto provisions.

The Republican takeover of the House in the midterm elections added momentum to pending trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. Business groups like the United States Chamber of Commerce support the trade agreements, as do financial services companies.

On Sunday, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader in the Senate, said that he had discussed the trade agreements with Mr. Obama, and mentioned them as a possible area of bipartisan cooperation. “The notion that we’re at each other’s throats all the time is simply not correct,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

An important exception to corporate support for the agreement is Ford, the only one of the big three Detroit automakers that has not gotten a bailout. On Thursday, Ford ran full-page ads in newspapers stating: “For every 52 cars Korea ships here, the U.S. can only export one there.”

While the agreement would lower or eliminate tariffs on cars in both countries, other barriers would remain, including emissions, mileage and safety requirements and tax and insurance rules that automakers and the United Automobile Workers union say discriminate against American cars.

“American-made cars can compete and win globally, but we can’t afford a future with more closed markets to American exports,” Ford said in the ad.

Chrysler has reservations about the agreement in its current form. General Motors, which owns a Korean automaker, Daewoo, has remained neutral.

The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said last week that the negotiators hoped to amend provisions that were “tilted against auto companies and autoworkers.”

The other major sticking point is beef. Shortly after taking office in 2008, Mr. Lee moved to relax restrictions on imports of American beef, which had been banned since 2003 because of concerns over mad cow disease. That led to protests in Korea, with scores of injuries.

South Korea now permits imports of beef from cattle younger than 30 months, which are the least likely to harbor the agent that causes the disease. But Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees trade, has called for lifting all restrictions on American beef exports.

Democrats have been skeptical of claims that the deal will create jobs. In a joint letter last month to Mr. Obama and Mr. Lee, 20 House members and 35 Korean lawmakers called for strengthening health, labor and environmental standards in the agreement, echoing concerns raised by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. But neither government seems to want to revisit those terms.

Republicans broadly support the deal the Bush administration negotiated. “Not only does the Korean market offer excellent growth prospects for American firms, but a free-trade agreement with Korea will have huge foreign policy and national security benefits in Asia,” said Clayton K. Yeutter, who was the trade representative from 1985 to 1989, under President Ronald Reagan.

The United States had a $10.6 billion trade deficit in goods with South Korea last year, and supporters of the agreement say it would help close that gap. South Korea signed a free-trade agreement with the European Union last month, and business groups say the United States should complete the deal to remain competitive.

Han Duk-soo, the South Korean ambassador in Washington, who is trying to build support in Congress for the agreement, said in a recent interview that the imported share of the Korean auto market had risen substantially over the last decade and that the United States enjoyed a sizable trade surplus with his country in agricultural products.

Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Seoul, South Korea.

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Countering China, Obama Backs India for U.N. Council

Mr. Obama’s announcement, made during a nationally televised address to the Indian Parliament, came at the end of a three-day visit to India that won high marks from an Indian political establishment once uncertain of the president’s commitment to the relationship. Even as stark differences remained between the countries on a range of tough issues, including Pakistan, trade policy, climate change and, to some degree, Iran, Mr. Obama spoke of India as an “indispensable” partner for the coming century.

“In Asia and around the world, India is not simply emerging,” he said during his speech in Parliament. “India has emerged.”

Mr. Obama’s closer embrace of India prompted a sharp warning from Pakistan, India’s rival and an uncertain ally of the United States in the war in Afghanistan, which criticized the two countries for engaging in “power politics” that lacked a moral foundation.

It is also likely to set off fresh concerns in Beijing, which has had a contentious relationship with India and has expressed alarm at American efforts to tighten alliances with Asian nations wary of China’s rising power.

But warmer ties between the United States and India, in the making for many years, come at a crucial time for Mr. Obama. He and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are headed to South Korea later this week for a meeting of the Group of 20, apparently in agreement on what is expected to be a significant clash between the world’s big powers over the United States Federal Reserve’s plan to boost the American economy by pumping $600 billion into it.

China, Brazil and Germany have sharply criticized the move by the independent Fed, which they see as intended to push down the value of the dollar to boost American exports. Germany’s finance minister equated the move to currency manipulation “with the help of their central bank’s printing presses.”

But at a Monday news conference, Mr. Obama defended the Fed’s move and won backing from Mr. Singh, who spoke about the United States’ critical importance to the global economy.

“Anything that would stimulate the underlying growth and policies of entrepreneurship in the United States would help the cause of global prosperity,” he said.

The good will between Mr. Obama and Mr. Singh, as well as the almost giddy reaction to the president and his wife, Michelle, in the Indian press, lent a glossy sheen to a United States-India relationship that is still evolving.

India remains deeply protective of its sovereignty, while the United States is accustomed to having the upper hand with its foreign partners. On Monday, Mr. Singh emphasized the need for the two countries “to work as equal partners in a strategic relationship.”

“For India, going back to the earliest days since independence, there has always been a very strong attachment to strategic autonomy,” said Teresita C. Schaffer, director of the South Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Americans throw around the word ‘ally’ with gay abandon.”

Mr. Obama arrived in India on Saturday bearing a big gift: his decision to lift longstanding export controls on sensitive technologies, albeit with some of the specifics still unclear. And the president also made several small-bore announcements about new collaborations between the nations on everything from homeland security to education, agriculture and open government.

Many Indian analysts said Mr. Obama had big shoes to fill, given the popularity here of his two predecessors. President George W. Bush is viewed with admiration, largely for his work securing a civil nuclear cooperation pact. And former President Bill Clinton, who in 2000 became the first American president to visit India in two decades, is fondly remembered for his gregarious personality and his own speech in Parliament, credited for reviving the relationship.

The headline moment of the trip was Mr. Obama’s announcement on the United Nations seat, even though the endorsement is seemingly as much symbolic as substantive, given the serious political obstacles that have long stalled efforts to reform membership of the Security Council.

All the major powers have said the post-World War II structure of the Security Council, in which the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China have permanent seats with veto power, should be changed to reflect a different balance of power. But it could take years for any changes to be made, partly because there is no agreement on which countries should be promoted to an enlarged Security Council.

The United States has promised to support a promotion for Japan and now India. China is viewed as far less eager for its Asian neighbors to acquire permanent membership in the Council.

But administration officials and independent analysts emphasized the significance of the president’s political message.

Ben Rhodes, a top foreign policy adviser to Mr. Obama, said the endorsement was intended to send a strong message “in terms of how we see India on the world stage.” Meanwhile, in Washington, even critics who had blamed Mr. Obama for letting the relationship with India drift reacted with praise — and surprise.

“It’s a bold move — no president has said that before,” said Richard Fontaine, a former adviser to Senator John McCain who wrote a critical report of Mr. Obama’s India policy last month for the Center for New American Security. “It’s a recognition of India’s emergence as a global power and the United States’ desire to be close to India.”

But any outreach to India is bound to cause problems for Mr. Obama in Pakistan. In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry warned that Mr. Obama’s decision would further complicate the process of reforming the Security Council. Pakistan, the ministry said in a statement, hopes the United States “will take a moral view and not base itself on any temporary expediency or exigencies of power politics.”

For Mr. Obama, the Pakistan-India-United States nexus creates a delicate dance. The Obama administration is selling warplanes to Pakistan, a move viewed with suspicion here.

During his three-day visit, the president faced criticism for being too soft on Pakistan; during a question and answer session with college students, one demanded to know why he had not declared Pakistan a “terrorist state.” And even Mr. Singh, standing by the president’s side at a joint news conference Monday, reiterated India’s position that it could not have meaningful talks with Pakistan until it shut down the “terror machine” inside its borders.

But if Mr. Obama’s cautious language on Pakistan provoked initial unease, his speech at Parliament seemed to put the matter to rest when he called on the Pakistani government to eradicate “safe havens” for terrorism groups and prosecute the perpetrators of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai that killed at least 168 people.

“Indians were keen to listen to two ‘p’ words,” said Rajiv Nayan, a strategic affairs analyst in New Delhi. “Permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council and, second, on Pakistan.”

Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from the United Nations.

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