Monday 30 / June / 2025
Washington: The United States and South Korea have reached an agreement in principle on a new trade pact and details will be released soon, the White House said on Tuesday.
"We have come to an agreement in principle and we expect to roll out specific details on that very soon," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told a briefing. Her comments were the Trump administration's first confirmation that the two sides had reached an agreement in trade talks covering revisions to the U.S. South Korean Trade Agreement (KORUS) and a South Korean exemption from new U.S. metals tariffs. Seoul on Monday announced a deal to limit U.S. imports of South Korean steel, while extending high U.S. pickup truck tariffs and increasing U.S. automakers' access to the Korean market.
But details of the agreement have not yet been released by the U.S. Trade Representative's office, which led the negotiations for the United States after President Donald Trump last year called the six-year-old bilateral pact a "horrible deal" that had doubled the U.S. trade deficit with South Korea since 2012.
The deal is expected to permanently exempt South Korea from Trump's tariffs of 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminium, but South Korea will have to reduce its steel exports to the United States by 30 per cent from its average over the past three years to about 2.68 million tons.
South Korea was the third largest steel exporter to the United States last year after Canada and Brazil.
