ISDS Case Map
geopolitics
A private think-tank claims that South and North Korea should work on signing a free trade pact to prompt changes in the communist country and eventually achieve consolidation of the two divided Koreas.
With the president's top domestic priority -- immigration overhaul -- in tatters, the Bush administration is intensifying efforts to move its trade agenda on Capitol Hill, using national security as an argument for four free-trade deals it wants Congress to pass as quickly as possible.
It has taken a while for the US to work out an effective strategy to counteract ALBA.
The crisis facing the US empire in the Middle East is also playing out in American efforts to maintain economic dominance in Asia and Latin America.
The United States and Vietnam signed a trade and investment framework agreement (TIFA) June 21 ahead of a June 22 meeting between Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet and U.S. President George W Bush. By warming up its trade relationship with Vietnam, the United States is facilitating an alternative for US investors and businesses that want to set up production operations outside China.
On April 2, the first US congressional hearing after the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement was concluded and was a complaint-filled affair.
Charles Rangel, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives, accused Thursday the government of US President George W. Bush of pressing the Congress to pass a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Colombia in order to counter Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
It remains unclear to me what the advantages of being part of the Saarc grouping are over entering into bilateral relations with each individual Saarc country instead. I have always like the concept of Bimstec instead.
The US-South Korea free trade agreement comes at precisely the moment when America's military presence on the Korean Peninsula is rapidly diminishing, anti-US nationalism in South Korea is growing and China is playing an ever more important leadership role in the region. "This FTA is about countering China," says Yang Sung Chul, a former US ambassador to South Korea, now professor at Korea University in Seoul. "It's much more significant in strategic than economic terms."
ASEAN is being fragmented by intensifying US-China competition for regional influence, which is putting a premium on bilateralism with the big powers at the expense of ASEAN's ambition toward more regional multilateralism.
