The US Secretary of State said that India is among the United States’ “closest partners”. The report comes as the Secretary of State Antony Blinken met External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in Cambodia ahead of the ASEAN ministerial meeting on Thursday.
Both Antony Blinken and Jaishankar are in Cambodia to attend the ASEAN ministerial meeting.
The Department of State issued a statement that the meeting is an opportunity for both countries to compare notes on various mutual interest areas including free and open Indo-Pacific and Sri Lanka crisis.
“Taking part in the ASEAN meetings is the opportunity for us to get together and compare notes with our closest partners, starting with my longtime friend, Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar,” Antony Blinken said in the statement.
“This is an opportunity for us to compare notes as we head into these very important ASEAN meetings. We’re both strong proponents of ASEAN centrality. We have a shared vision together for a free and open Indo-Pacific that we work on in so many different ways every single day,” he said further.
The Secretary of State also signified many important obstacles that remain in Sri Lanka and Burma.
“We have some immediate challenges that we’re both concerned with including the situation in Sri Lanka, Burma and a number of other hotspots. So I very much look forward to once again being able to go through a number of these issues with my friend, and then we’ll both head over to the meetings,” he said in the statement.
Meanwhile, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told him, “Always good to meet. There’s a lot we need to talk about and it is actually been a very busy year, we had a very good Quad and since then I think a number of developments all over the world…”
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
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