Paul McGarr's exhaustively researched and clearly argued account of Cold War diplomacy in South Asia is a welcome addition to the growing historical literature in this area. This book traces in great detail the ways in which Britain and the United States sought to gain and keep influence with postcolonial states like India and Pakistan. It also describes the ways in which these South Asian states not only responded to such Western efforts but also actively shaped them. Other scholars, such as Andrew Rotter and Douglas Little (to name but two), have highlighted the cultural and social perceptions that underlay American policy choices and procedures in the Middle East and South Asia. McGarr himself notes the importance of culture in diplomacy, but his work stands out more for his explication of the intricate maneuverings and decision-making processes that marked what he ultimately judges to have been two decades of ill-advised and generally fruitless Anglo-American efforts to cultivate relationships with South Asia.

Working chronologically, from the partition of British India through the aftermath of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War, McGarr demonstrates the various tacks both Britain and the United States took toward South Asia and the rationales that informed them. The overall picture is of complicated quadrilateral diplomacy, featuring an American obsession with China, a British effort to remain globally influential as empire disappeared, and an India and Pakistan often at odds and each highly attuned to the treatment the other received from the world's other powers. Added to these elements were such complicating factors as Jawaharlal Nehru's determination to keep India as a nonaligned power and the desire of both China and the Soviet Union to influence South Asian affairs.

To take but one example of how such a complicated dynamic affected policy, McGarr gives a detailed account of efforts in 1962 to establish an Anglo-American-backed air defense system for India. Air defense had become a vital concern for Nehru following India's defeat in a border clash with China, and while he wished to acquire British or American support for his project, the Indian premier was unwilling to tie this assistance to an abandonment of nonalignment. As the US ambassador, J. K. Galbraith, noted: “One must defend India in a properly neutral way” (233). The Kennedy administration was willing to contribute, as a way of bolstering India against China, but only in such a way as not to offend the Pakistanis, with whom the United States had agreed to a military relationship in the 1950s, mainly to use Pakistan as a staging ground for intelligence gathering on the Soviet Union. The Americans proposed that Britain take the lead in offering fighters, technology, and training for India, as well as make a commitment to India's sovereignty. This appealed to Britain because it meant an increase in vital Indian purchases from British military manufacturers, but it also might have jeopardized British economic relations with Pakistan and even China, while committing Britain to a potential future conflict with China, something the Americans might contemplate more realistically than a definitively second-tier power like the United Kingdom in 1962. In the end, India decided that with a Chinese threat receding by 1963, the perception of abandoning nonalignment for air defense purposes was no longer worth it.

It was likely these sorts of fruitless endeavors, as well as the rise of more pressing issues, like American involvement in Vietnam and the contraction of the British economy, that by 1965 led both to follow a policy of “parallelism,” providing some limited military aid as well as general economic aid to both India and Pakistan (289). The 1965 war brought even this sort of approach to an end. The United States and Britain suspended all military aid to both of the warring parties, leading to Pakistani condemnation of the Americans and Indian criticism of Britain. Moreover, Harold Wilson, the recently elected prime minister, angered India greatly by publicly chastising it for expanding the conflict out of Kashmir and into the Punjab. In Washington, the war convinced an already skeptical Lyndon Johnson, who did not share the Kennedy administration's concern for South Asia, that American interests in Asia were best served elsewhere, fatefully in places like Vietnam. In the decade that followed, India, under Indira Gandhi, tilted much more definitively toward Moscow, while Pakistan explored much stronger connections to Beijing.

McGarr makes a convincing case that neither the Americans nor the British fully understood South Asia's political dynamics or realized the limitations of instruments like economic aid packages. In many ways, the efforts of these Western powers emerged out of illusions, or perhaps delusions, with the United States seeing China as more of a threat than it ever was and with the United Kindgon believing that it still preserved a role in the world east of Suez. Readers of McGarr's work will certainly be struck by some aspects of this history that seem to have recurred today. In foreign policy circles in the West, the idea of India as now an economic as well as an ideological counterweight to China is almost a truism. And American policymakers might take heed of the concerns expressed in 1961 by, of all people, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, that “the uncomfortable reality” of aid to Pakistan was that much of it was not directed toward the Soviets, but was instead stockpiled for future conflicts with India (96). This is what occurred in the 1980s as well, though it is not clear that the lesson has hit home yet. McGarr's book is praiseworthy not only for its reconstruction of this complicated diplomacy but also for its admonitory judgment about the limits and realities of power politics and state relationships in South Asia even today.