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US President Donald Trump has arrived in South Korea to discuss trade and security ties with President Lee Jae Myung, on the final leg of an Asian tour that will culminate in a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Trump will meet Lee on Wednesday afternoon in the south-eastern city of Gyeongju, with the two sides yet to finalise a trade deal that would give South Korea a lower tariff rate of 15 per cent in exchange for $350bn investment in the US.
Trump said last week that a deal between the countries was “pretty close to being finalised”, but Lee has insisted that several “sticking points” — including the amount, method and timeline of the Korean investment — remained unresolved.
“It is still a situation where one can neither be optimistic nor pessimistic,” Lee Kyu-youn, a senior aide to President Lee, told reporters on Wednesday, according to South Korea’s state-owned news agency Yonhap.
Korean officials told news agency Yonhap this week that Lee was planning to give Trump a replica of an ancient golden crown dating back to the Silla Kingdom, which ruled much of the Korean peninsula from Gyeongju during the first millennium. He is also expected to award Trump his country’s highest civilian order of merit, the Grand Order of Mugunghwa.
The blandishments come despite a rocky period in the allies’ relationship, which has been tested by Trump’s tariffs. In September, US immigration enforcement agents arrested and shackled hundreds of Korean workers at a battery plant in the US state of Georgia, further troubling ties between Washington and Seoul.
Without a deal on South Korea’s mooted $350bn investment, Asia’s fourth-largest economy continues to be subject to 25 per cent US tariffs, placing its auto exporters at a disadvantage relative to Japanese rivals, who are subject to a 15 per cent tariff under Tokyo’s agreement with Washington.
Korean officials are also nervous about the Trump administration’s determination to “modernise” the countries’ defence alliance, including by shifting its focus more squarely on China’s growing military capabilities.
Trump, who was greeted by a South Korean air force band playing “YMCA”, said that he would “love to meet” North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un. He added that he would be prepared to discuss sanctions relief on the regime.
In 2019, during his first term as president, Trump met Kim in the demilitarised zone separating the Koreas.
“If [Kim would] like to meet, I’m around, you know. I’ll be in South Korea, so I can be right over there,” Trump said.
But Pyongyang has ruled out Seoul playing a role in any future diplomatic engagement with Washington. On Wednesday, North Korea announced it had test fired nuclear capable cruise missiles from a warship located off its western coast.
Trump appeared to concede that a meeting with Kim was unlikely, telling reporters on Air Force One on Wednesday: “We’ll come back and we’ll, at some point in the not too distant future, meet with North Korea. At some point, we’ll be involved with North Korea.”
The US president’s trip to South Korea, where he will also attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, came a day after a visit to Japan, where he held his first meeting with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.
The leaders pledged to bring the US-Japan alliance into a new “golden age” and signed a deal on rare earths designed to reduce their countries’ dependence on China.
Trump will hold a summit with Xi on Thursday, after US and Chinese negotiators at the weekend reached a tentative agreement to extend the ceasefire in their trade war.
