Obama welcomed in South Korea as trip nears end

Dozens of anti-war protesters rallied outside the U.S. Embassy on Wednesday chanting "no more South Korea troops to Afghanistan." Later, though, more than 100 people waved U.S. and South Korean flags and yelled, "Welcome, Obama, U.S.A."

North Korea is an area where little daylight separates the leaders, unlike before. They are united in their impatience with North Korea's habit of making overtures, getting rewards and then backtracking to raise tensions again, and Obama and Lee were expected to discuss next steps in detail.

Seoul, fearing a military strike over its border or a rush of refugees from the North, has historically resisted a sterner approach toward ending the impasse over nuclear weapons — with it and China generally less interested than the U.S. and Japan in pursuing more sanctions. Those nations, as well as Russia, are in the six-party talks with North Korea over the active weapons program it has in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Lee, though, has changed tack, talking of a "grand bargain" in which Pyongyang would get a one-time offer of concessions to replace the step-by-step process that has yielded little so far.

Obama, too, has made much of his desire to take a different approach. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il said the country will return to the six-party process it abandoned earlier this year only if Washington engages separately in one-on-one talks with the North. Days before Obama's arrival in the region, administration officials said Stephen Bosworth, the U.S. special envoy for North Korea, would visit Pyongyang on an unspecified date, probably this year.

Trade, though, is trickier territory for the allies.

Despite positive talk about wanting to move the trade deal, the South Korean government has received no official proposal from the Obama administration on how to do so, said a senior South Korean government official, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity.

Obama reinforced the sense that the issue isn't on a fast track in a round of TV interviews hours before his South Korean arrival.

"The question is whether we can get it done in the beginning of 2010, whether we can get it done at the end of 2010," he told Fox News. "There's still some details that need to be worked out."

The accord would be the largest for the U.S. since the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s and the biggest ever for South Korea. Lee likes to talk of it as offering a $10 billion boon to the U.S. economy. The South Koreans have balked at any suggestion of reopening the agreement.

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