Strategic Dialogue a momentous achievement: US

The United States on Tuesday described the first ever Cabinet-level Strategic Dialogue with India as a "momentous achievement" as it set the pace and tone of partnership between the two largest democracies of the world.

"It was the first time that we have had a whole-of-government approach in which we had many different ministers and cabinet secretaries from both sides of our government come together and think and discuss strategically how to take the relationship forward," Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake said at a State Department Blog Forum.

"The Strategic Dialogue was really quite a momentous achievement for both of our countries," said Blake who has served as the Deputy US Ambassador to India and the US Ambassador to Sri Lanka.

We had a very good, productive two and a half hour plenary session, followed by a lunch, which all of us believe are -- really help us to tee up a lot of very, very important initiatives for what we know will be a very consequential visit by the President to India this fall, he said.

Blake said the United States has been building up its bilateral relations with India for a long time now. "It started with the Strobe (Talbott) and Jaswant Singh dialogue, but - and really, we began to - first with counter-terrorism cooperation and defence cooperation," he noted.

Now, I think the new thing in our relationship is to look ahead at how can our two countries work together not only to benefit our two peoples, but also increasingly the peoples of the world, Blake said.

Blake said he was really struck that a lot of the conversation that took place during the Strategic Dialogue was about these big global issues and it was things like food security, about developing an initiative between the United States and India to help the Feed the Future initiative in places like Africa.

"It was about how we can work together more productively on climate change. Prime Minister Singh, of course, was a very key part of the successful outcome in Copenhagen, and we see him as a very important partner going forward towards Mexico City," he said.

It was about the nonproliferation dialogue that you have written a lot about, which again, I think because of our civil-nuclear deal, which is still in progress and making good progress, we now have completely changed the narrative and we can begin to talk about how we can cooperate globally on nonproliferation issues, Blake said.

And the President was very pleased to host Prime Minister Singh as one of his visitors for the Global Nuclear Security Summit, he added.