The US-China relationship "is a priority for both countries" and both sides aim to build confidence through the upcoming Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), a US expert on international relations told Xinhua in an interview on Friday.

"The S&ED will ... make it clear that the US-China relationship is a priority for both countries," said Taiya Smith, a researcher at the Washington-based think-tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"This first round of the new dialogue needs to focus on building relationship between our two countries' governments," said Smith, who had been Deputy Chief of Staff to former US Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson. Paulson successfully launched five rounds of similar dialogues.

She said that "it also needs to sort out the process for the dialogue. Once the organizers learn how to work together, they will be more able to focus on results from the discussions."

Right now, both sides are dealing with complex issues and they need to know that they can trust each other to be able to find constructive solutions to these issues, she said.

For Smith, the S&ED effectively combines two former dialogues -- the Strategic Dialogue and the Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED).

"By expanding the SED to include the issues previously discussed under the former dialogues, the two sides will have very few issues that cannot be discussed in a high level dialogue. This is important for our two countries," she said.

"As we develop our strategic relationship, we need to make sure that we establish working relationship between the top officials in both countries across the range of issues that present opportunities for positive collaboration and potential tensions," she said.

The dialogue should discuss in great detail about the financial crisis, climate change and potential trade remedies.

"It is not realistic to expect the two sides to resolve these issues in one dialogue, but we can expect them to develop a plan for how they can talk about them," Smith said.

With a lot of experience handling the SED during the administration of George W. Bush, Smith believed that long-term strategic issues could make big strides forward through incremental progress and concrete projects.

"We established the Ten Year Framework on Energy and Environmental Cooperation to provide a platform and help with the prioritization of topics. On other issues, we found that we could reach an agreement at one SED and then expand that agreement at the next round of the SED," She said.

"By being willing to move slowly and work closely together on these difficult issues we found that we were actually able to make some rapid progress," she added.

Hopefully, the S&ED will be able to make "progress in the next two and a half years," Smith said.

(Xinhua News Agency July 26, 2009)