CAMP DAVID, United States (AFP) — US President George W. Bush and South Korean leader Lee Myung-bak on Saturday will wrap up their two-day summit designed to promote a huge free trade pact and plans to dismantle North Korea's nuclear programs.
On Friday, Lee became the first South Korean leader ever welcomed to the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland's leafy Catoctin mountains.
Upon arrival here, he happily accepted Bush's offer to slide into the driver's seat of a Camp David golf cart -- prompting the US president to joke to assembled reporters that "he's afraid of my driving."
The summit was set to focus on the six-country talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons drive, with the White House seemingly bending backwards in hopes of a breakthrough before Bush leaves office in January 2009.
The two leaders, joined by their economic and national security teams, also discussed prospects for ratification of a giant free trade deal signed a year ago -- now that South Korea has agreed to reopen its markets to US beef.
Although the two leaders had not met before, they share a business background, conservative free-market principles, and Christian values -- and US officials say they like Lee's tough line on North Korea.
That has helped to warm ties between the two allies since Lee took over the helm of the world's 10th biggest economy barely two months ago.
Relations with the United States, which has 28,000 troops stationed in South Korea, had deteriorated under Lee's predecessors Roh Moo-Hyun and Kim Dae-jung over their support for North Korea.
On the eve of the Bush-Lee talks, South Korea announced it has agreed to give US beef greater access to its market, a fillip to a free trade agreement (FTA) signed about a year ago but still unratified by their legislatures.
South Korea banned imports of US beef in 2003 due to mad cow disease fears. It eased the ban in 2006 but effectively halted all imports last October.
Washington wanted full access to the beef market for any ratification.
"Both sides reached an agreement on gradual expansion of US beef imports," South Korea's Assistant Agriculture Minister Min Dong-Seok said in Seoul.
US Trade Representative Susan Schwab said "the major obstacle" to Congressional consideration of the FTA has now been removed and "the administration will now work in earnest with Congress and the US agriculture, manufacturing, and services sectors to pass the FTA."
But Democratic lawmakers remained skeptical.
"A last-minute, unenforceable, untested agreement on beef is not enough to satisfy Congress," said Representative Sander Levin, who heads the powerful House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee.
If ratified, the agreement will add about 20 billion dollars a year to trade between the two nations, said Dennis Wilder, the White House national security director for Asian affairs.
In a bid to mend fences with Pyongyang, Lee proposed Thursday the creation of the first liaison offices in the capitals of the two Koreas, which are still technically in a state of war since their 1950-1953 bloody clashes.
"If President Lee believes that it will contribute in a positive way to the relationship, then we, of course, support his decision," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.
Lee has promised a firmer line on North Korea, linking aid to nuclear disarmament in a move that has angered the hardline communist state, which threatened to turn its neighbor into "ashes."
In a turnaround Thursday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hinted that US sanctions against North Korea could be removed even before its nuclear programs or proliferation activities were verified independently.
"Verification can take some time," she told reporters.
North Korea has been pushing the United States to remove it from the blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism.
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