Jaishankar meets Israel, US, UAE counterparts; in-person talks aimed for future

The ministers, at the end of the meeting, decided to appoint senior-level professionals to a joint working group that will formulate options for cooperation in the fields of transportation, technology, maritime security, economics, and trade, as well as for additional joint projects.

Updated on: Oct 19, 2021, 14:00:36 IST

By Shishir Gupta, Hindustan Times, New Delhi

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India, Israel, the US, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have decided to establish an international forum for economic cooperation. The decision was taken at a virtual meeting between US secretary of state Antony Blinken, minister of external affairs S Jaishankar, minister of foreign affairs of the United Arab Emirates Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and the minister of foreign affairs of Israel, Yair Lapid.

The ministers decided to establish an international forum for economic cooperation and announced the intention to hold an in-person meeting of the ministers in the coming months at Expo 2020 in Dubai.

They also expressed willingness to hold an in-person meeting of the ministers in the coming months at Expo 2020 in Dubai.

Also Read | India, Israel share ties of centuries: Jaishankar

During the meeting, the four ministers also held a discussion on possibilities for joint infrastructure projects in the fields of transportation, technology, maritime security, and economics and trade, as well as for additional joint projects. At the end of the conversation, it was decided that each minister will appoint senior-level professionals to a joint working group that will formulate options for cooperation in the aforementioned areas.

Lapid, the Israeli foreign minister, who initiated the meeting during his visit to Washington, said at the beginning, “Around this virtual table, there is a unique set of capabilities, knowledge, and experience that can be used to create the network that we all want to see created.”

“I think the word we’re looking for here is synergy because this is what we’re going to try and create, starting with this meeting," he added. "Synergy that will help us work together on infrastructure, digital infrastructure, transport, maritime security, and other things that preoccupy us all.”

Jaishankar, in his brief comment, said, "the three of you are among the closest relationships we have, if not the closest".

He agreed with Blinken that this kind of a forum could work much better than three different bilateral engagements, citing the fight against Covid-19 as an example of the benefits of such cooperative mechanisms where bilateral ties tend to fail.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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