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WASHINGTON: Vietnam's defence minister, making a rare visit to the United States, met on Tuesday with a key US Senator who called ties between the two former war foes "very important".
General Phung Quang Thanh met with Democratic Senator Jim Webb, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, and was to meet with Senator John McCain, the Senate Armed Services Committee's top Republican.
"It is vitally important that the United States engage with Southeast Asia at all levels," Webb, a former Marine who served in the Vietnam war and visited Hanoi in August, said after his roughly 35-minute meeting.
"I have worked for many years to build a bridge between Vietnam and the United States. It is a very important relationship," Webb said through a spokeswoman.
McCain is also a Vietnam war veteran who spent five and a half years as a prisoner after being shot down over Hanoi.
Thanh also met with his US counterpart, Defence Secretary Robert Gates, and agreed to enhance military-to-military engagement through a formalised mechanism for both countries to discuss "issues of bilateral and regional concern" at senior defence levels, a Pentagon spokeswoman said.
The countries will conduct the dialogue beginning in 2010, spokeswoman Maureen Schumann said.
Vietnamese media have underlined that Thanh was just the second Vietnamese defence minister to visit the United States since the two countries normalised relations in 1995, 20 years after the Vietnam War.
The visit came after a longstanding dispute between China and Vietnam over ownership of the Paracels and a more southerly archipelago, the Spratleys, escalated earlier this year.
- AFP/so
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