Review: Friends with Benefits; The India-US Story by Seema Sirohi

It is a universally accepted rule that friendship is between equals. So, Seema Sirohi’s book Friends with Benefits: The India-US Story got me wondering when these two nations (poles apart in national power, political determination to enforce deterrence, world view, and statecraft) were actually friends, with the US willing to give and take benefits. Interestingly, Henry Kissinger in his book Diplomacy wrote, “Used to the two-power world which existed during the Cold War, the US, at no time in its history had participated in a balance-of-power (give and take cooperation) system.”

Consider the strategic objectives of India and the US in their unequal relationship. Starting with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s 1985 visit to the US, the country’s stated objective was to get US high-end and dual-use technology. This objective remains unfulfilled. The Vajpayee and Modi governments added India’s second unstated objective: to be identified as being close to the US.

The US objectives, on the other hand, kept pace with geopolitics. In 1985, the strategic objective of the US was to wean India away from the Soviet camp. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, conscious of India’s size, geography, potential, and large standing military, Lt Gen Claude M Kicklighter from the US Pacific Command visited India in 1991 and offered military cooperation across the defence services. From 1998, when India did the nuclear tests and until 2008 when India signed the Indo-US 123 agreement, which closed the Indo-US civil nuclear deal (called the framework document of 18 July 2005) to the satisfaction of the Americans, non-proliferation was the sole objective of the US. They succeeded in this.

Since then, the strategic objective of the United States has been defence trade for interoperability, and support for US military architecture in the Asia Pacific (renamed Indo-Pacific in May 2018). A month before taking over the US Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Harris told me in April 2015 that his objective was joint combat patrols between the two militaries. This critical US strategic objective was accomplished on 27 October 2020, when India signed the last of the four US military foundational agreements — Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA) — in a tearing hurry during the Trump administration, a week before the US went for voting in the presidential elections. This is where Sirohi’s book ends with the perplexing remark, “Personalities will continue to matter in driving the India-US relationship,…