Greenland isn’t the only island
where President Donald Trump’s proclivity for online posting is exposing new fractures in NATO.
Trump’s repeated — and very public
— criticisms of U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands treaty with Mauritius has sparked a diplomatic firestorm, leading to mixed messages from the British government about whether the deal would be put on “pause.”
The British Indian Ocean Territory encompasses the collection of about 60 islands, most of which are tiny and uninhabited specks of coral peeking out through the waves. The exception is Diego Garcia, the location of a military base that is considered to be one of the most strategically important American outposts.
After long, painstaking negotiations that began years before Starmer took office, the United Kingdom appeared to be on the verge of an agreement to hand over the territory to the former British colony of Mauritius and promptly enter a 99-year lease to maintain possession of Diego Garcia. The goal was to prevent international legal tribunals from claiming the British occupation of the territory is illegitimate — and the agreement had been backed
by the State Department only days before Trump torched it on Truth Social.
Forecast
talked to Ben Judah,
a former special advisor to British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, about why this territory matters and what this means for Anglo-American relations moving forward.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What is so important about these islands?
Well, there’s an old saying that they’re in the middle of nowhere, but they’re halfway to everywhere. The Chagos Islands are some of the most strategic pieces of real estate that exist in the world — if you want to be in a commanding position in the Indian Ocean, staring at Africa, the Middle East and, of course, right into Asia.
Why is there suddenly a dispute about all of this?
What made sense for the United States in the 1960s, which was to have the colonial power stay, has started to become a headache for both the U.S. and the U.K. And the reason is that the manner of decolonization has meant that the U.K.’s legal position is on the verge of collapsing. There’s been a non-binding resolution at the International Court of Justice. The U.K. Foreign Office and the State Department and every other legal department that matters around the world knows that a binding judgment is inevitable, and that will rule that the British Indian Ocean Territory is an illegal occupation of Mauritian territory. This means that this crucial Anglo-American super-base will, in the eyes of the rest of the world, be in illegally occupied territory.
So why should we care about that? The hard-power reason is that there’s not just one island called Diego Garcia. There are 1,000 atolls around it, stretching across a huge swath of territory — from the edge of the Maldives deep into the Indian Ocean. If there’s no deal, and if there’s a binding judgment — which there will be — Mauritius will walk away. It will walk away not just from the deal, but it will walk away from the West. It’s a swing state in the great game for the Indian Ocean, and it will quite likely throw its eggs into the Chinese basket. It can then invite China into all of those other atolls. It might begin with a fishing fleet. It could develop into a research station. All of a sudden, there could be a Chinese base within striking and listening range of Diego Garcia, with the full force of international law behind it.
[Dealing with this] would be a huge sink for cash and military resources for both the United Kingdom and the United States, which is why the Labour government set about negotiating a deal where, in order for everything to stay the same, everything changes. In terms of who gets to color it in the atlas, it goes from being Britain to Mauritius — but everything else stays the same.
So why is Trump blowing this up?
The prime minister’s mistake was to think that he was still living in a world of foreign policy, of Western unity and a deep consensus of the national interest. Sen. Arthur Vandenburg used to say politics stops at the water’s edge — when in fact we’re living in a world of foreign politics. And the British right has been mounting a diplomatic campaign in the United States to make the idea of British sovereignty over these territories, as some of the last remaining specks of empire, a kind of totem of what it means to be on the global right — of standing up to international law, of standing up to any kind of idea of giving up territory. And Trump, who sees himself as the leader, and is
the leader, of the global right, has been influenced by this campaign from the likes of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss
and Nigel Farage.
What lessons broadly do Starmer and other American allies both in Europe and outside of Europe take from this?
The lesson being kind of drawn in London is that, in the 20th century, the Anglo-American alliance was capable of sort of subtle realpolitik, because there was a shared sense of the national interest on both sides of the aisle. It was the era of foreign policy. Now that’s gone. We’ve both become sort of emotional, turbulent, social media-driven societies who are simply not going to be as capable of the kind of subtle statecraft that we were in the Cold War days. That’s the lesson I’m drawing. And the lesson I think we need to draw is to know what kind of things our societies are going to be capable of — and not capable of — in the great game against China in the 21st century.
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