America's FTAs with Australia and Korea: Motivations, Complications, Implications

Free trade agreements have spread in the Asia–Pacific since the late 1990s, and the United States has been an active player in this process. This article analyses the motivations for FTAs in general, and those that the US has completed with Australia and South Korea in particular. Motivations can be divided into a liberal view that states finalise FTAs for predominantly economic reasons, and a realist expectation that political and security (i.e., non-economic) interests are the main motivation for FTAs. The article analyses the economic aspects of the KorUS- and AUS FTAs in order to ascertain which explanation is most convincing, and we find that political and security factors are most useful to understanding FTA politics in the region. Economic motivations were evident in the cases examined here, but political and strategic interests seem to be much more important, as illustrated in our analysis of the negotiation and finalisation of the agreements, the linkages between the FTAs and bilateral security relations, and the recent negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.