South Korea Seeks More U.S. LNG Imports to Fix Trade Imbalance

South Korea has thrown in the towel without a fight after the U.S. slapped tariffs on all of the country’s trade partners. Seoul is looking at more LNG imports to get Washington to drop the new tariffs.

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“We need to adjust the US trade balance, which is a surplus from our perspective, to reduce US tariffs,” South Korea’s trade minister, Cheong Inkyo, told media as quoted by Bloomberg ahead of a two-day trip to Washington. “It is difficult to reduce exports, so we need to increase imports.”

South Korea has a very export-focused economy, which has served it well until now. Last year, the country booked a trade surplus of $55.7 billion with the United States, which automatically put it in the category of “abusers,” as President Trump called the countries running trade surpluses with the U.S. Trump slapped a 25% tariff on South Korean imports—one of the highest.

“We’ve already expressed our regret about this, and this time, too, we will raise the fact that the US calculated such a high tariff rate for a country that has been implementing the Korea-US FTA for 12 years,” Cheong also told reporters.

The range of tariffs that President Trump announced last week is between 10% and as much as 49%, with some of the United States’ biggest trade partners and closest allies getting a higher rather than a lower rate as they might have hoped for based on their geopolitical closeness with Washington. India, for instance, got slapped with a tariff rate of 26%. China, which the U.S. sees as a geopolitical adversary, was hit with a 34% additional tariff rate.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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