MADRID - Relations between Spain and the United States have improved, Spain's Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said on his return from a trip to Washington on Monday.
Relations between the two had cooled since the Socialist Party honoured an election promise and withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq after their election win in March 2004.
"Without contact you can't have fluid communication so that is what we are going to try and improve on," he told radio station Cadena Sur.
"Now we can say we have moved on to a new level," said Moratinos, who met his American counterpart Condoleezza Rice on his three-day trip.
"There had been no personal misunderstanding," he said referring to US President George W. Bush and Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
Spain's Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso on Monday began an official three-day trip to the United States where he will suggest closer ties in their respective efforts to stem terrorism and organised crime.
He will meet new US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Karen P. Tandy, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, and the head of the CIA, Porter Goss.
Two other Spanish ministers are due to travel to the United States next month.
The Spanish prime minister said at an EU-US summit in February he had had cordial exchanges with Bush, who reportedly greeted him in Spanish.
Zapatero raised the ire of Washington with the troop withdrawal while his predecessor, Jose Maria Aznar, had been one of Bush's main backers during the war in Iraq.
04/18/2005 18:53 GMT