, Narendra Modi made his fourth visit to the United States as Indian prime minister to address a joint session of the US Congress. Setting out a new vision for the future, he proclaimed that finally Indo-US ties had 'overcome the hesitations of history'. 1 Within two months of his address, India and the United States agreed to sign a long-pending foundational defence agreement: the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), first proposed in 2004. It took approximately a decade for India to sign the agreement, mostly because New Delhi remained hesitant about entering into a close defence partnership with the US. This hesitancy was in turn attributable in part to the ideological remnants of the Cold War adversarial relationship, underpinned by India's preference for 'nonalignment'; in part to a leadership which was short on authority, if not conviction. 2 Since the end of the Cold War, successive Indian governments have signalled a commitment to a robust partnership with the United States. 3 The increasing closeness of the Indo-US relationship over the last quarter of a century is therefore a pan-partisan trend. Even so, in his first two years at the helm since May 2014 Modi brought about a qualitative change in the relationship. 4 Some even argue that a 'fundamental transformation' in the Indo-US relationship is under way. 5 From resolving the prickly issue of civil nuclear energy cooperation to significantly upgrading defence cooperation, and in arriving at a common understanding on a range of international issues, Indo-US relations seem to have reached an 'extraordinarily good place'. 6
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