South Korea and the United States Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) in 2006-2019 and Its Impact on the South Korea-US Alliance

The article presents a study of the South Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) and is divided into two parts. In the first part, the author briefly addresses the background of the agreement and explores in detail the current state of the KORUS FTA after its modification in 2018. The author examines key modifications made in the agreement and their influence on the Republic of Korea (ROK), the United States, and the ROK-US alliance. The first part also analyzes why President Trump, instead of delaying the KORUS issue, pushed its revision in 2017, when the situation on the Korean Peninsula was quite explosive, and the motives of the Trump administration in resuming Section 232 investigation, particularly into imports of semiconductors. In the second part, the author addresses future prospects of the agreement in general and briefly analyzes its impact on the ROK-US alliance. The author does not attempt to evaluate the quality of the alliance by measuring the state of the KORUS FTA. Nevertheless, while the trade agreement does not reflect all the strengths or weaknesses of the alliance, it is one of the criteria of the alliance development. Statistical data is employed throughout the article to illustrate the trade imbalance between South Korea and the US, import and export volume, and opinion survey results. In conclusion, the author sums up the results obtained and highlights the importance of the KORUS FTA for the ROK-US alliance. The relevance of the article lies in the fact that the work is based primarily on foreign sources and literature, which allows expanding the knowledge base of domestic Korean studies. This article is also a part of a more comprehensive study in this area and can serve as a supplementary modern literature for Russian researchers who major in Korean studies and deal with issues related to the South Korea-US relations. The methodological basis of the study consists of the principle of historicism and approaches such as structural-functional and systematic. The article employs general scientific, general historical and political science research methods. Among the general scientific methods, the author used methods of analysis and synthesis; time comparison method and complex method. Among the general historical methods, the historical-comparative method and the historical-genetic method are applied for demonstrating the causal relationship between political events, and the historical-systematic method for singling out a certain period in the historical process in which the problem is investigated. Finally, among the political science methods, content analysis and event analysis are employed for a better assessment of political events.

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