Washington, June 22 (IANS) Welcoming India ‘as a strong and enduring Asia-Pacific partner’, the US and Japan have said they would promote a trilateral dialogue among the three nations.
The two sides ‘welcome India as a strong and enduring Asia-Pacific partner and encourage India’s growing engagement with the region and participation in regional architectures’, said a joint statement issued Tuesday after the first US-Japan Security Consultative Committee Meeting held since 2007.
They would also ‘promote trilateral dialogue among the United States, Japan, and India’, it said.
The statement was issued after a meeting among US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates and Japanese Foreign Minister Takeaki Matsumoto and Defence Minister Toshimi Kitazawa.
Earlier, at a State Department press conference, Clinton also noted ‘we talked about our efforts to improve regional cooperation in a variety of multilateral forums and through a trilateral dialogue with India’.
Discussions during this year’s meeting focused on the most critical challenges facing the Asia-Pacific region, Gates said. ‘Those include the denuclearisation of North Korea, supporting continued progress in Afghanistan, and maritime security,’ he said.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
