ed Meddlesome partners

President-elect Park Geun-hye silenced the foreign ministry last week by reaffirming that its trade-negotiating function should move to the industry ministry. Yet local diplomats read of unexpected supports from sectors in U.S. industry published in financial papers.

"This would be a big step backward for Seoul, which during the past decade has thrown itself into free trade negotiations with passion,” the Wall Street Journal stated in an editorial which emphasized the advantages of free trade and problems of protectionism. "Instead, she proposes to take Korea’s trade policy back to the chaebol-dominated days…”

Of course, one of media outlets’ main functions is to criticize policymakers, local or foreign, and they can pay particular attention to changes in major trade partners. Also, free trade is a good thing, on which Korea depends for much of its current prosperity.

But there are differences in views regarding the merits of trade liberalization especially since the 2008 global financial crisis resulting in a large part from Anglo-American neo-liberalistic economic credo of free market idolatry. How can we foreigners interpret the revival of the "buy-U.S. campaign” in the aftermath of the crisis?

And there can be few one-size-fits-all administrative organizations because each country has its own peculiarities. In Korea, the foreign ministry’s negotiators have been widely blamed for pushing to conclude as many free trade deals as possible and as quickly as possible without paying due attention to their adverse effects on most domestic industries.

So the chief negotiator of the Korea-U.S. deal became a lawmaker on the ruling party’s ticket, while his deputy was promoted to a vice minister while local farmers were reeling. Park was right to point out what’s important are not the deals but their follow-up measures.

Korea has a problem with its family-controlled conglomerates but it is also true its entire manufacturing industry, like it or not, is a web of the chaebol and their smaller suppliers. This can be solved not by opening the market wider but elaborate industrial restructuring, at least for the time being, unless the U.S. and other foreign manufacturers instantly replace their home suppliers with Korean ones.

Sadder still is the suspicion among domestic industries that the foreign ministry might be behind the foreign media’s condescending criticism of Seoul at a time when many here call for partial renegotiation of the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement.

In many ways, the foreign ministry should think why most Koreans, from its leader down, do not view it favorably.