US and Vietnamese officials held meetings on the sidelines of the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said on September 22 that she and Vietnamese Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son met and discussed many issues.
She wrote on Twitter: “Today, on sidelines of the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Vietnam’s Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son and I discussed our common strategic vision on regional security, the role of ASEAN centrality and the maintenance of a rules-based international order in the South China Sea and the Mekong region.”
On the same day, General Director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Samantha Power had a meeting with Senior Lieutenant General Hoang Xuan Chien, Deputy Minister of Defense at the USAID headquarters in Washington, DC.
Ms. Power tweeted pictures of the meeting, with information that she and Chien “discussed the USAID-Vietnam partnership, which includes addressing war legacy issues.”
“We are committed to doing this work, including finding and identifying the remains of Vietnamese and US soldiers,” Ms. Power added on Twitter.
According to USAID in Vietnam, Ms. Power “affirms USAID’s commitment to overcoming the consequences of war, including cooperation to deal with dioxin contamination in the Bien Hoa airport area, and improving health and social services to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities regardless of cause in Vietnam, improve DNA analysis techniques to search and identify unidentified Vietnamese military remains.”
Earlier, on September 21, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Vietnam, Vietnamese President Nguyen Xuan Phuc had an exchange with the US President’s Special Envoy on climate change, Mr. John Kerry.
The ministry said that Phuc “appreciated the initiatives to promote a global joint effort to respond to climate change by the Biden administration” and “affirmed the need for countries to join hands, support each other to respond to climate change most effectively.”
Phuc also “suggested that Vietnam and the United States continue to strengthen cooperation in this area, including developing renewable energy, improving adaptability to climate change, and managing natural resources in transboundary countries through bilateral and multilateral mechanisms.”
According to the US embassy in Vietnam, Mr. Kerry “thanked” Mr. Phuc “for the fruitful meeting to discuss climate action.”
The US State Department said that the success of the upcoming climate change summit in Glasgow “depends on all of us” and that “both of our countries need to strengthen cooperation on energy development, improve climate change response and management of transboundary water resources through bilateral and multilateral mechanisms.”
Thoibao.de (Translated)
