Nepal Prime Minister to conclude US visit
Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba will conclude his three-day visit to the US today.
Today’s visit marks 75 years of US-Nepalese relations, but is the first bilateral visit by a Nepalese prime minister to the US. Previous prime ministers have visited the US, generally to attend UN conferences in New York, but none have made official diplomatic visits to Washington thus far.
Deuba’s tour came on the back of Nepal rejecting the US’ State Partnership Program (SPP) over concerns that the program would tie Nepal into a military alliance with the US—the result of a clause denoting partnership between the Nepalese Army and the Utah State National Guard. The SPP was abandoned when the Nepalese Army stepped in and asserted that it would not support any foreign policy that would potentially violate the South Asian nation’s policy of non-alignment or heighten tensions with neighboring China.
Expect that after this diplomatic tussle, the visit will have served to calm any potential tensions between Nepal and the US. Expect also that this will lay the foundation for increased investment in Nepal by the US government as a means of cooperation and fostering goodwill given the cancellation of the SPP.
