South Korea has thrown in the towel without a fight after the U.S. slapped tariffs on all of the country’s trade partners. Seoul is looking at more LNG imports to get Washington to drop the new tariffs.

The South Korean government is working on several packages of measures to be taken to erase the trade surplus it has with the U.S. in a bid to convince President Trump to remove the additional tariffs, with the focus on boosting imports instead of cutting exports.

“We need to adjust the US trade balance, which is a surplus from our perspective, to reduce US tariffs,” South Korea’s trade minister, Cheong Inkyo, told media as quoted by Bloomberg ahead of a two-day trip to Washington. “It is difficult to reduce exports, so we need to increase imports.”

South Korea has a very export-focused economy, which has served it well until now. Last year, the country booked a trade surplus of $55.7 billion with the United States, which automatically put it in the category of “abusers,” as President Trump called the countries running trade surpluses with the U.S. Trump slapped a 25% tariff on South Korean imports—one of the highest.

The range of tariffs that President Trump announced last week is between 10% and as much as 49%, with some of the United States’ biggest trade partners and closest allies getting a higher rather than a lower rate as they might have hoped for based on their geopolitical closeness with Washington. India, for instance, got slapped with a tariff rate of 26%. China, which the U.S. sees as a geopolitical adversary, was hit with a 34% additional tariff rate.

Source: Oilprice