Seoul and Washington ended their first round of a special session of a joint committee devoted to initiate possible rewriting of the five-year-old Korea-U.S. free trade agreement Tuesday in Seoul without setting a new date or agreeing to proceed further with U.S. wishes for changes.

“We confirmed there was a difference in the need of revising the bilateral FTA terms. We did not agree to initiate formal negotiations as demanded by the U.S. We argued the two countries should jointly investigate, analyze, and evaluate the impact of the FTA on each economy and study the cause of U.S. trade first before we could embark on negotiations,” said Korean trade representative Kim Hyun-chong in a briefing after the meeting.

Kim faced his counterpart Robert Lighthizer for the first time in a video conference.

The special session was held after the U.S. Trade Representative officially last month asked for sessions to explore “amendment” in the bilateral trade pact which U.S. President Donald Trump called as a “job-killing” “horrible deal.” In recently released annual report, the USTR accused the largest bilateral trade deal implemented under the former Barack Obama administration has “coincided with a dramatic increase” in the trade deficit with Korea and claimed “Plainly, the time has come for a major review of how we approach trade agreements.”

Kim reiterated that the U.S. was seeking “amendment or modification” not “renegotiation” in the bilateral deal. Under the Korea-U.S. FTA, any negotiation to revise the terms can start upon agreement of both countries.

Trump has irked its trade partners by commanding exit from U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership and renegotiation on long-established North American Free Trade Agreement upon taking office.

In actual meeting, U.S. officials were less aggressive in building on their case with the $27.6 billion U.S. trade deficit with South Korea last year, more than doubling from $13.2 billion in 2011 prior to the trade deal that went into effect in 2011.

But experts believe they will come back possibly with a bigger bill that can include greater Seoul contribution to the cost for U.S. military presence in Korea. Given the alarming progress in North Korea’s nuclear and missile weapons program, trade issues could be bundled with military ones, they say.

By Ko Jae-man and Seok Min-soo

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