With President Barack Obama announcing on Wednesday that Washington and Havana were about to complete their rapprochement and restore full diplomatic relations, there remain only three countries in the world with with the United States has no official ties.

As The New York Times noted, two of them -- North Korea and Iran -- are traditional foes, and U.S. interests in those countries are represented by so-called "protecting powers" -- the Swiss Embassy in Tehran and the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang, according to the Department of State.

But the lack of U.S. relations with Bhutan, a tiny, landlocked kingdom at the eastern end of the Himalayas, may come as a surprise to many Americans. There are no disputes between Washington and the nation of about 750,000, but Bhutan "has maintained a Swiss-like aversion to foreign entanglements of any kind," The Atlantic explained.

The Buddhist country has no official relations with any of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and only began conducting its own foreign policy in 2007. Until then, its neighbor India had been in charge of defending Bhutan's interests abroad.

Nevertheless, there have been some official contacts, including a January meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and Bhutanese Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay, which took place at a regional summit in Ahmedabad, India, the magazine noted.

While their encounter was described as "warm and productive," it was not expected to lead to a diplomatic relationship, which was "not a subject of the conversation," according to Desai Biswal, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia.

After President Dwight D. Eisenhower had severed diplomatic ties with Cuba in January 1961, the United States had appointed Switzerland as its protecting power, though Washington maintained a sizeable U.S. Interests Section in Havana. The mission was housed in a seven-story building on the Malecón waterfront that previously served as the Embassy and is now expected to undergo a $6.6 million renovation so it can once again serve that purpose, the New York Times detailed.