The U.S.-South Korea relationship is one of the most important in the world. President Donald Trump would very much seem to agree. Hours before he and President Lee Jae-myung sealed their trade and security framework in Gyeongju in October, Trump hailed the two countries’ “special bond.” That framework — $350 billion in Korean investment into the United States, tariffs cut to 15%, new shipbuilding cooperation, and a green light for Korea to build nuclear-powered submarines on American soil — is one of the signature trade accomplishments of this administration’s term.
Done right, the U.S.-Korea trade framework locks in American jobs, strengthens our industrial base, and tightens the alliance against China for a generation.
But Korea may already be in breach of it.
SOUTH KOREA’S STARBUCKS TO CLOSE FOR STAFF HISTORY LESSON AFTER ‘TANK DAY’ REUSABLE CUP CAMPAIGN
Buried in the leaders’ joint statement is a specific commitment from Korea: It would make sure American companies aren’t discriminated against and don’t face “unnecessary barriers” in digital policy.
But the exact opposite is happening. Right now.
On Thursday, Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission hit Coupang — a U.S.-headquartered e-commerce giant — with a fine of 624.7 billion won, about $410 million, over a relatively low-sensitivity data breach affecting 33.7 million customer accounts. It’s the largest privacy fine in Korean history. Sadly, it came as no surprise: Lee all but pre-wrote the verdict back in December, before any investigation into the breach had been completed, when in a thinly veiled comment on the Coupang case, he shared his intention to punish firms violating data security rules so severely that they may “go out of business,” pushing for fines as high as 3% of a company’s annual revenue.
To its credit, Coupang has owned the breach. It was the work of a rogue former employee, and the company has expressed regret and tried repeatedly to resolve the matter with regulators.
Now compare that to two other recent Korean companies’ breaches involving Korean and Chinese companies — which exposed data that was, frankly, more sensitive. SK Telecom’s hack of 27 million subscribers’ involving highly sensitive financial data and identity-related information drew a fine of roughly $97 million in August. Alibaba’s October 2025 cyber incident — just a month prior to the Coupang breach — resulted in more than $6 million in losses for Korean businesses. Both cases involved worse conduct and more sensitive data. Yet neither case resulted in a penalty anywhere close to $410 million — let alone the broader unprecedented regulatory assault imposed on Coupang.
So why the different treatment? Because this was never really about privacy. It’s about politics. The chairman of Korea’s Fair Trade Commission suggested suspending Coupang’s business operations months before regulators had even issued formal findings. And as the House judiciary committee documented this year, Korean officials had already called for “aggressive penalties and hefty fines” against Coupang and even threatened criminal charges against the U.S. citizen running its Korean subsidiary.
This is a political hit job on an American company, and not just any company at that. Coupang is now South Korea’s second-largest private employer, with close to 100,000 workers. Its marketplace hosts more than 230,000 small and medium Korean businesses, whose sales on the platform grew 30% last year alone. By outside estimates, Coupang has been the single largest source of U.S. foreign direct investment into Korea over the past decade. The company facilitates billions of dollars in annual exports of American goods into Korea, including products from U.S. small businesses and brands.
In other words: It’s exactly the kind of high-tech, job-creating investment the new trade framework is supposed to build on.
But it gets worse. While Seoul was preparing to drop the $410 million hammer on Coupang, Chinese platforms Temu and AliExpress — caught shipping Korean users’ data overseas without consent — were fined less than $1 million and around $1.5 million, respectively. Keep in mind, China’s National Intelligence Law compels the handover of this data at the CCP’s direction, placing Koreans using these services at severe risk.
The disparate treatment is hard to ignore: American company? Full force of the law. Chinese platform? A parking ticket. A recent Wall Street Journal piece on Korea’s “hard left turn” cited the Coupang case as reflecting the Lee government and the ruling Democratic Party’s gradual drift away from Washington’s approach on China. Failing to uphold this double standard suggests that the writer’s take is not far off.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said essentially the same thing this month, telling Congress that Korea’s treatment of American firms has “impacted our ability to conclude a trade agreement with them,” echoing recent comments from Vice President JD Vance. Translation: Coupang’s shakedown is now a bilateral trade problem, not just a regulatory one.
Coupang says it will challenge the fine in court, and it should. But a Seoul courtroom can’t fix a political problem. Only Trump can.
To stand up for “America First” values — which means standing up for American companies — Trump needs to say it plainly for Lee and the Korean people: The $350 billion investment framework can’t move forward in good faith while Seoul weaponizes its own system against American firms. Indeed, the massive — and unequally applied — fine against Coupang is precisely the sort of “non-tariff” barrier that Trump rightly complains about, and that the bilateral agreement is supposed to address.
THE ANXIETY BEHIND XI JINPING’S PYONGYANG VISIT
Friends don’t treat friends this way. But, real friends also tell each other hard truths. The truth, as Trump has said himself, is that the U.S. and Korea “really sort of need each other” — on trade, on technology, on shipbuilding, and on countering China and North Korea.
Getting this deal back on track means Trump being Lee’s tough friend. And that starts with having Coupang’s back.
Mick Mulvaney is a former White House chief of staff and congressman from South Carolina.