By Adam Savit
In 2013, Chinese conglomerate WH Group acquired Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the United States. In 2017, Chinese state-owned enterprise ChemChina absorbed Syngenta, one of the world’s dominant seed and agrochemical companies, giving Beijing a commanding position in American crop inputs. In 2019, a South Korean company, CJ CheilJedang, spent $1.84 billion to acquire Schwan’s, an iconic American frozen food firm, and today employs thousands of Americans across its U.S. affiliates.
Two of these acquisitions are national security problems. One is not. Understanding why is the essential starting point for an America First assessment of South Korea’s economic relationship with the United States, and the unavoidable complication that Seoul’s own economic entanglement with China introduces into it.
America First Is Not America Alone
The America First framework does not treat all foreign capital as equivalent. It asks a precise question: who ultimately controls this asset, and under what legal system does that controller operate? WH Group and ChemChina answer to a party-state whose National Intelligence Law compels cooperation with state security organs, whose doctrine of military-civil fusion erases the line between commercial and military enterprise, and whose leadership has openly designated food security and agricultural technology as arenas of strategic competition. CJ CheilJedang answers to shareholders in a democratic ally bound to the United States by a mutual defense treaty.
This is why the policy architecture the United States has built since 2025—an architecture I worked to implement during my service as Senior Advisor for National Security to the Secretary of Agriculture—targets adversary control, not foreign participation. The National Farm Security Action Plan was announced jointly by multiple cabinet secretaries in July 2025, and they named Smithfield and Syngenta explicitly. The BIOSECURE Act, enacted in December 2025 as part of the annual defense bill, will move adversary biotechnology firms out of federal supply chains. The ongoing modernization of the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act and a wave of state agricultural land statutes—I have testified in support of such legislation in Ohio, Texas, Kansas, and South Dakota—are directed at entities beholden to foreign adversaries, a category defined in law that includes China and North Korea but not the Republic of Korea.
Korean investors should read this architecture correctly: it is not a wall against them. Properly understood, it is a preference for them. Every restriction on adversary capital in American food, agriculture, and infrastructure enlarges the space available to trusted allies. The question is what Korean firms carry with them when they arrive.
The Dependence Problem
Here is the complication. South Korea’s industrial economy is deeply embedded in Chinese supply chains, and that embeddedness travels with Korean investment into the United States.
The dependency numbers are stark. South Korea’s net import reliance on critical minerals exceeds 99.7 percent, and China supplies over 96 percent of its cathode precursors and 93.7 percent of its synthetic graphite. Koreans need no reminder of what this means in practice: the 2021 urea crisis, when Chinese customs restrictions nearly paralyzed Korean diesel transport—including the trucks that move food—demonstrated that Beijing treats even mundane commodity chokepoints as instruments of leverage. American agriculture runs on the same logic of hidden dependency: fertilizer inputs, crop protection chemistries, veterinary pharmaceuticals, and food processing equipment all carry concentrated China exposure that most Americans never see until it fails.
Washington has responded by writing supply chain hygiene into law. Under the Foreign Entity of Concern rules tightened by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, projects claiming U.S. energy tax credits must certify escalating shares of non-FEOC content—for battery components, 60 percent in 2026 rising to 85 percent by 2030—and the ownership tests reach any venture in which a single Chinese entity holds 25 percent or effective control. Korean battery and materials firms, several of which entered joint ventures with Chinese cathode and precursor makers precisely to serve the American market, have been forced to restructure those ventures, buy down Chinese equity, and re-source inputs. Those ventures were lawful when they were signed, and unwinding them cost Korean firms real money, but ultimately this resulted in a durable position in the American market. LG Energy Solution’s push to produce battery cells in Michigan free of Chinese components is the model: allied capital that arrives having already severed the adversary’s grip.
This is the template that should now extend beyond batteries. As Korean conglomerates expand into American food manufacturing, agricultural processing, and critical infrastructure—and as the two governments stand up the machinery of the $350 billion investment package—the same discipline must apply. Chinese capital, components, and data access must not reach the American heartland through Korean corporate packaging. Allied capital deserves an open door, but not a waiver.
Points of Friction and How Seoul Is Managing Them
None of this is to pretend Seoul’s position is easy. China remains South Korea’s largest trading partner, and Beijing has spent 2026 sharpening its coercive toolkit. Days after Presidents Trump and Xi met in Beijing this May—a summit that produced assurances on mineral flows—China promulgated a decree implementing a Mineral Resources Law that authorizes “countermeasures” against states restricting China’s mineral supply chains. Korean industry sits directly in that blast radius. Seoul chaired the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement—Washington’s allied minerals coalition—from its February 2026 launch until handing the gavel to the United States this summer, while maintaining a hotline with Beijing to keep Chinese mineral imports flowing. A critic might see this as hedging, but it is also predictable behavior of a mid-sized power carefully working toward a 100-day strategic mineral stockpile. That is a reason for the alliance to move faster, not a reason for recrimination.
The encouraging news is that where Korea has committed to diversification, it has delivered. Canada now supplies over 70 percent of Korea’s germanium, displacing China. In addition, China’s share of Korean antimony imports collapsed from 69 percent to 27 percent within a year of Beijing’s export controls, though indium and graphite remain another story. And the energy relationship shows the same trajectory: U.S. crude accounted for 16.3 percent of Korean oil imports in 2025—up from a fraction of one percent a decade ago—alongside major LNG commitments under the trade framework, though Korean refiners caution that their plants are configured for heavier Middle Eastern grades.
Diversification away from adversary chokepoints is not a theoretical aspiration for Seoul. It is a demonstrated capability awaiting extension into agriculture-adjacent inputs—fertilizers, urea, food-grade chemicals—where the vulnerability is shared.
The New Standard for Korean Investment in America
The July 2025 trade framework, finalized at Gyeongju and enacted by the National Assembly’s Special Act in March 2026, commits $350 billion to strategic American industries—$200 billion in cash installments and $150 billion for shipbuilding—administered through a new Korea-U.S. Strategic Investment Corporation. This is the largest allied industrial commitment to the United States in Korean history, and it lands in exactly the sectors America First policy has prioritized: shipbuilding, energy, semiconductors, and the industrial base that ultimately feeds and fuels the country. However hard the bargaining that produced it, the commitment now rests on Korean statute rather than on any single tariff instrument—and the standards below are what will let it outlast them all.
For that capital to compound trust rather than erode it, four standards should govern, and Korean firms are well positioned to meet all of them. First, transparent beneficial ownership: every Korean investment vehicle entering U.S. agriculture, food processing, or infrastructure should be able to demonstrate the absence of Chinese equity, board control, or contractual “effective control” above de minimis levels. Second, FEOC-grade supply chain discipline beyond the tax code: Korean-built facilities in sensitive sectors should certify non-adversary sourcing for critical inputs even where no statute yet compels it, because tighter statutes are likely coming. The same discipline applies to origin: Chinese content routed through Korean facilities to claim allied provenance is precisely the failure mode U.S. enforcement is now policing, and Korean firms gain nothing by testing it. Third, data and technology hygiene: no Chinese-jurisdiction software, cloud dependencies, or equipment—from agricultural drones to port cranes—embedded in Korean-operated American infrastructure. Fourth, reciprocity at home: Korea screens inbound investment under the Foreign Investment Promotion Act and guards technology outflow under its industrial technology protection statute, but neither instrument reaches as far as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) or U.S. export controls. Converging them—in coverage, in enforcement, and in which sectors they treat as sensitive—is what will keep Seoul from becoming the soft flank of the allied system.
The Alliance Advantage
The crucial America First insight about the U.S.-ROK economic relationship is that it is a substitution opportunity. Nearly every position China has purchased in the American economy—pork production, crop science, food processing, batteries, port equipment—is a position an ally could hold instead. Korea has the capital, the industrial sophistication, and now the institutional framework to be that ally at scale. What Washington asks in return is not the impossible severing of all Korean commerce with China. It is that the Korean capital and technology entering the United States arrive verifiably free of Beijing’s ownership, inputs, and reach.
Smithfield and Syngenta taught America what adversary capital in the food system looks like. Schwan’s shows what allied capital looks like. The task for both governments over the next decade is to make the second story the norm, write the standards that keep the first from recurring, and build an allied economic architecture that Beijing can neither buy into nor break.
Adam Savit is Director of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute and served as Senior Advisor for National Security to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.
