ASSISTANT SECRETARY RUSSEL: Sawat dii khrab. Thank you. It’s really a pleasure to be back again in Thailand. Thanks in particular to you, PermSec Apichart, and your great team at the Foreign Ministry for very excellent arrangements.

I want to thank my own team. I’m very proud of them and the work done by our talented Embassy here in Bangkok led by my friend, Ambassador Glyn Davies. This year we have celebrated our 182nd anniversary of bilateral relations with Thailand.

The Kingdom of Thailand remains a true friend and an important partner and ally. This dialogue, as you've just heard, covered all aspects of the broad cooperation between us, on issues like law enforcement, public health research, wildlife trafficking, human trafficking, trade and investment, and there’s more.

Now, at one level the Strategic Dialogue we held today is a symbol of our continued commitment to the U.S.-Thai partnership. We care deeply about our relationship with Thailand. We care deeply about the Kingdom of Thailand, and we want to continue to work together and to expand our cooperation in the years to come.

We want to see, and I made this [point] very clearly, we want to see Thailand be successful. And that includes a successful return to democracy which will allow us more fully to realize the extraordinary potential of this great relationship.

But, our dialogue was more than just symbolic. It was very substantive as you just heard. Given Thailand’s important and long-standing role in the region and given the importance of this region to America’s security and economic future, we had a wide-ranging discussion on a variety of issues, both bilateral issues but also developments in the neighboring countries here in Southeast Asia and further afield in the South China Sea.

We reaffirmed our resolve to develop our relationship in ways that further our shared security, our shared prosperity, and promote the stability of this region and beyond. In addition [to] the issues that I mentioned at the outset, we discussed a variety of practical programs to strengthen our cooperation on health, on humanitarian assistance, on disaster relief, on global peacekeeping, on irregular migration, on education, on science and technology, on empowering women and girls, and so on.

We, the United States, look forward to building on all of these initiatives in 2016. We will continue our robust engagement and we place great importance on the upcoming leaders’ meeting—the summit that President Obama will host in the United States— and then the U.S.-ASEAN leaders’ meeting that will be held in Laos later in the year. I’ll have a chance to continue my discussions with the government later today and tomorrow, but I want to close by once again thanking the PermSec and the government of Thailand for the excellent arrangements. Thank you.

QUESTION: Apichart earlier mentioned that both sides are working with certain constraints. Could you elaborate on the constraints the both countries are working with for bilateral relations.

PERMANENT SECRETARY APICHART: The constraints ‎that we were talking about was maybe some legal constraints that the US has in regard to the political situation. For example, the military cooperation, some types of scholarships cannot be granted to Thailand. Assistant Secretary could be elaborating better than myself. But it is very, very limited constraints.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY RUSSEL: What we do work on, as you have heard, very closely together [on a] bilateral and multilateral basis with Thailand, including important third country cooperation and cooperation in multilateral and international institutions.

Under U.S. law, there are statutory limits to how we can cooperate and interact on a military-to-military basis and that means that ultimately the full potential of the relationship, all that we can cooperate will be realized and dramatically enhanced when we all hope the Kingdom of Thailand is restored to a full civilian-led democratic government.

There is a lot that we can do and are doing in the meantime, you’ve heard from the PermSec a snapshot of the extent of the discussions we had today on cooperation. On the military side, although there are certain forms of military assistance that we cannot engage in, and although we review our military-to-military engagement with Thailand on a case by case basis, one important example of our continued cooperation is the multinational Cobra Gold exercise that the US and Thailand will jointly co-sponsor in 2016.

This is an exercise that brings together many, many nations in the region to prepare to address big challenges that face us all—like the challenge of natural disasters. So we exercise cooperation on humanitarian assistance and disaster response, disaster relief. And the benefit of this cooperation was out on clear display during the cooperative U.S.-Thai response to the devastating earthquakes in Nepal very recently. So there is a lot that we do, there is much more that we can do, and we hope to be able to restore the totality of our bilateral cooperation.

QUESTION: The Deputy government spokesman said this morning that you told the PM that nowadays the U.S. government nowadays has more understanding towards the situation in Thailand but that you admit that the American citizens and media still lack true understanding about Thailand in certain issues such as freedom of expression and human trafficking. Can you verify that statement?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY RUSSEL: Well, I will leave to the Spokesman of the Thai government to speak on behalf of the Thai government and I will exercise my prerogative to speak on behalf of the U.S. government. I did, as I mentioned to the press earlier today, have both a very warm reception from Prime Minister Prayuth, but also an opportunity to have a genuinely candid and substantive discussion with him on a wide range of interests, of common concerns.

He created an opportunity—and I valued that—for me to engage and share directly with him both our hopes, our goals, and our concerns, both with regards to the political situation in Thailand and the prospect for growing U.S.-Thai cooperation. Now there are a number of areas in which we may not come to agreement. One thing that we do agree on is the importance of the Thai people charting a path to a stable and secure future. That path leads to civilian-led, democratic government.

The U.S. is a friend of Thailand. We stand with the Thai people. We stand with the Thai nation. We want to see Thailand unified, stable, secure, prosperous, and influential, because Thailand has a very important role to play in both [the] region and on the international stage.

I had a chance to share with the Prime Minister some specific areas of our concern. He took those on board I believe, and [I] will report back to Washington that I got a full and respectful hearing. I also, of course, listened carefully to the Prime Minister’s own descriptions [of] the political situation and his road map to return the Kingdom of Thailand to a full democracy.

So, the human rights that the U.S. and others advocate for are not Thai-specific, they are not America-specific. These are universal rights. These are freedoms that all people seek and all people deserve. And it is our devout wish that the wishes and rights of the citizen of the Kingdom of Thailand will ultimately be realized in the culmination of a stable democratic civilian-led government.