Keir Starmer has made a mess of things.
Keir Starmer has made a mess of things.
I n October 2024, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced his intention to cede the Chagos Islands — an archipelago in the Indian Ocean that includes the island Diego Garcia and its joint British/American military base — to Mauritius. This move blindsided both his own and other parties, as it had not been discussed in the run-up to the election just three months earlier. Now, the House of Lords has intervened to delay the handover. With President Donald Trump recently having announced his opposition to the deal, the U.S. should now use this delay to stop it altogether.
While it may seem an internal British matter, it is anything but. Mauritius is a strong Chinese ally: Its trade with China has grown rapidly since the two countries signed a free trade agreement (China’s first such agreement with an African country), and China is now its top import partner. While not formally part of the Belt and Road Initiative, it still receives similar Chinese infrastructure investments. To Chinese investors and businesses, Mauritius serves as a gateway to the African market.
Under the deal, the U.K. would lease the Diego Garcia base — and not for free. Britain, which under Margaret Thatcher sent most of its surface fleet on a mission 8,000 miles away to retake the Falkland Islands after the Argentinian invasion, is now under Starmer paying for the privilege of giving away territory. In fact, one hang-up that has delayed the deal has been the Mauritians’ repeated demands that Britain pay them more.
While the treaty does not allow Mauritius to lease any nearby island to China, this is hard to prevent in practice. Further, Mauritius is allowed to permit anyone — not just descendants of the islanders expelled during the construction of the base in the 1960s and ’70s — to resettle to any island save Diego Garcia, without British or American vetting. There is thus nothing to prevent Chinese spies from taking up residence nearby.
Under the deal, foreign vessels would be able to sail closer to the islands than now. Although officially this includes only nonmilitary vessels, it is easy to see how China could circumvent this, using civilian vessels for the purpose of spying or interference. At a time when China is flagrantly violating previous agreements with the U.K. over Hong Kong, and possibly preparing to invade Taiwan, ceding the Chagos Islands to Mauritius would be giving China a reward it has not earned and would send a dangerous signal.
Given the importance of the base, which played a major role in the Gulf War as well as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, this should be a cause of concern for Americans.
Starmer has hailed the agreement as a way to “secure” the Diego Garcia base, claiming that the U.K. and U.S. might otherwise have lost it completely. This is patently absurd. Mauritius does not keep a standing army and could never take the islands by force.
Rather, what Starmer is referring to is an opinion issued by the United Nations’ International Court of Justice in 2019, which ruled that Mauritius was the rightful owner of the islands. This opinion was nonbinding and advisory, but Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, feels duty-bound to enforce it in the name of the “rules-based international order.”
Yet there is another reason: Since taking office, Starmer has been a major disappointment to almost everyone — his approval rating stands at 15 percent, with 73 percent disapproving — but especially to his party’s left wing. While he has raised taxes, he has refused to introduce a wealth tax. He has also made cuts to some benefits (though he is walking those back), and he’s abandoned a pledge for full gender self-identification. On top of that, his government has not been nearly anti-Israel enough to please the party’s left.
By engaging in some old-fashioned, 1960s-style decolonialization, Starmer is throwing a bone to the most extreme segment of his party’s activists and core voters. At least Harold Macmillan didn’t pay to give away his country’s territory.
That said, this move could not accurately be considered decolonization. Mauritius has never controlled the Chagos Islands. While they were part of the same British colonial territory, which Britain conquered from France in 1810 during the Napoleonic Wars, they are 1,250 miles apart, and their histories are entirely separate: Most Mauritians are of Indian ethnicity, whereas Chagossians are descendants of African slaves taken to the uninhabited islands. Past arbitrary colonial borders wreak havoc across Africa to this day and certainly should not be used to determine whether one country has a right to another country’s territory. The precedent that this would establish is horrendous.
In any case, Mauritius was, as a gesture of goodwill, already financially compensated for the “loss” of the Chagos Islands in 1965 when the islands were ceded from British Mauritius ahead of Mauritius’s independence three years later. The matter should thus have been definitively settled.
When the Diego Garcia base was built, the Chagossians were expelled, with most ending up in the U.K., the Seychelles, or Mauritius (where they faced discrimination). Since then, they have been protesting for their right to return. Yet, now that a partial return (to all islands except Diego Garcia) is possible, Chagossians are at the forefront demanding that the deal be stopped, as they do not wish to live under Mauritian authority and do not consider themselves Mauritian. To hand over the Chagos Islands would crush their dream of returning under an arrangement similar to the Falklands’.
The left may have a notoriously selective view of who has a right to self-determination, but that does not mean the U.K. or U.S. must abide by it.
Establishing a precedent that the U.N. and its International Court of Justice may force the U.K. to cede territory would be a dangerous path, and not just for Britain. Gibraltar is notably contested, and its strategic importance to the United States, with its military facilities and its geographic position at the strait that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, cannot be overstated. The Falkland Islands and their almost 1 billion-barrel proven oil reserves (famously coveted by Argentina) might also be next. Even the British-owned Ascension Island midway between South America and Africa, with its critical joint U.S.-British military base, could be at risk. Of course, Ascension was unpopulated when Europeans first discovered it, meaning no African nation could logically lay a historical claim to it. Then again, so were the Chagos Islands.
Historically, the United Kingdom has been among America’s closest and most reliable allies. This deal, beyond leaving an open question as to which other strategically important territories may be yielded in the future, would also put the U.K.’s reliability as a military partner in doubt: If the U.S. and U.K. conducted a joint operation, such as the invasion of Afghanistan, and the U.N. condemned it — would the U.K. under Starmer back out mid-mission, leaving America holding the bag?
After initially giving the handover the green light last spring, despite criticism from among others his own Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James Risch, Donald Trump reversed his position this week in a post on Truth Social. Fortunately, there is still time for the United States to intervene and stop the deal. One example would be by unilaterally declaring that it will prevent any resettlement of the Chagos Islands, effectively meaning the United States would still act as if the islands were British (or even American). Resettlement would require massive infrastructure investments, as the islands have been unpopulated for half a century, and the threat of U.S. sanctions or direct intervention (i.e. a blockade of the islands) would pose an insurmountable barrier for Mauritius, as it has no realistic prospect of winning a military confrontation.
The U.S. could also threaten Britain that it would cease to do its part to keep the Diego Garcia base running. Given that the American presence at the base is much larger than that of the British, this would render the base virtually unable to operate. While this “nuclear option” would also hurt American interests in the short term, in the long run, operating and depending on a base that is susceptible to Chinese interference could prove far more dangerous. Even raising the prospect of scaling back activities on Diego Garcia would send a powerful signal to Starmer.
Keir Starmer’s efforts to appease both his party’s left-wing extremists, and his own guilty conscience as a human rights lawyer, cannot be allowed to undermine the special relationship that is the basis for Anglo-American strength in the world. The U.S. must intervene to keep the Chagos Islands out of Mauritian and, most importantly, Chinese hands.