The Trump administration’s refusal to give any ground on the joint U.S.-U.K. Diego Garcia military base in the Indian Ocean has it on a collision course with Mauritius — and could make it even more difficult for the U.S. to secure the facility from potential foreign threats. Back in February, President DONALD TRUMP said he was opposed to a proposed treaty that would have given Mauritius sovereignty of the Chagos islands, including Diego Garcia. Now the U.K. has suspended that effort , and Mauritian Foreign Minister DHANANJAY RAMFUL has threatened to “seize any diplomatic or legal avenue” to claim the islands. GOP lawmakers including Sen. TED CRUZ (R-Texas) and Reps. CHUCK FLEISCHMANN (R-Tenn.) and ROBERT ADERHOLT (R-Ala.) have a warning for Mauritius: The U.S. will push back on any move by the southeast African nation to claim sovereignty over the Chagos islands which includes Diego Garcia. “If Mauritius now moves to claim sovereignty anyway, I fully expect President Trump will make it exquisitely clear to them that they should rethink that decision, and that Congress will take whatever steps are necessary to provide him with the tools to do so,” Cruz told NatSec Daily. The State Department referred queries to the White House, which didn’t respond to NatSec Daily’s request for comment. Sen. JOHN KENNEDY (R-La.) said the U.S. should prevent a Mauritian claim of sovereignty because its control of the archipelago would be a strategic win for Beijing. “The importance of Diego Garcia cannot be overstated and China’s President XI JINPING has that figured out,” Kennedy said. “That’s why he’s salivating at the thought of pushing Mauritius to inspect our base or pressure us not to station nuclear capabilities there.” The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to NatSec Daily’s request for comment. The Mauritian government has said nothing publicly on the issue beyond Ramful’s comments and its embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment. There was a “firm government assessment” by U.K. officials that Mauritius would pursue a claim with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, or ITLOS, for control of the islands if the treaty fell through, said BEN JUDAH , a former special adviser to the U.K.’s then-Foreign Secretary DAVID LAMMY and who helped negotiate the treaty . The U.K. embassy in Washington declined to comment. An ITLOS legal ruling that could disrupt Diego Garcia operations would constitute ”baseless international lawfare being perpetrated at the behest of our adversaries in sadly increasingly irrelevant international bodies,” Fleischmann said in a statement. Judah argued to NatSec Daily that the solution is to strike a deal with Mauritius that protects the Diego Garcia facility before a possible ITLOS decision that extends Mauritius’ borders to include the Chagos Islands, complicating the U.S.-U.K. claim to the base. “If that happens it creates this security dilemma for the U.K. and the U.S. which is the rest of the world believes and acts as if they are illegally occupying these islands, which means that if the Mauritians wanted to invite in the Chinese or anybody else, then we would have no way to stop them, apart from militarily,” Judah said. |