The Best Chagos Deal Is No Deal

National Review Online

Monday, February 09, 2026

 

A late 19th-century British historian once wrote that the country had acquired its empire “in a fit of absence of mind.” That’s a subtler phrase than it sounds, but, however it is interpreted, it doesn’t describe Britain’s Labour government plan to hand over the Chagos Archipelago, a last scrap of empire, to Mauritius some 1,300 miles away.

 

The Chagos Islands and Mauritius, of which it was once a “dependency,” were British since things went wrong for Napoleon. In 1965, the archipelago became a separate colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory. The following year, the U.K. agreed that Diego Garcia, the largest Chagos island, should become the site of a major, primarily American, military base. In a shabby episode, the Chagossians (of whom there were about a thousand on the island) were deported to Mauritius and the Seychelles. Another thousand living elsewhere were not allowed home.

 

Mauritius, independent since 1968, has long demanded the “return” of the Chagos Islands, to which it had only been attached as a matter of administrative convenience. Its claim was backed by an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice but consistently rejected by the U.K. However, in 2022, Britain’s remarkably inept Conservative government started talking to Mauritius about the islands’ future. Even so, the announcement two years later by the newly elected Labour government that it was going to hand them over came as a shock. This was compounded by the deal that accompanied it: the U.K. would transfer sovereignty and then lease Diego Garcia back for an inflation-adjusted £101 million per year for 99 years, extendable by mutual agreement for additional 40-year periods. Britain was giving up what it owned and then paying to lease some of it back.

 

The Chagossians (who now number about 10,000), many of whom now live in the U.K., found themselves at the wrong end of another deal over which they had no say. Many have little affection for Mauritius (some would prefer self-determination), where they had often been marginalized. They still have no right to go back to the archipelago (a return to Diego Garcia itself has been ruled out) and are unimpressed by the size of a proposed £40 million trust fund. A U.N. committee has opposed ratification of the treaty, ironic given that one of the purported reasons for the British surrender was to end the controversy over the base.

 

Mauritius has agreed not lease any other Chagos islands to anyone else, but given its increasingly close relationship with China, that’s at best tepid comfort. There would be nothing to stop the Chinese maintaining some sort of presence on land (albeit short of a lease) or at sea disturbingly close to Diego Garcia.

 

Diego Garcia matters. It is a key depot in a strategically valuable location, an ideal jumping-off point for operations in the Middle East, East Africa, and South Asia and well situated for keeping an eye (or more) on various potential maritime choke points such as the Strait of Hormuz.

 

The agreement also provides that Britain must “expeditiously inform Mauritius of any armed attack on a third state” from Diego Garcia. Whether notice is required before or after an attack is uncertain, but obviously the former (cc’d quite possibly to Beijing) could be disastrous. The British government’s claim that the “full operational autonomy of the base” would remain intact is also undermined by Mauritius’s view that the transfer would subject the islands to an earlier treaty it had signed under which Africa and its offshore islands are supposed to be nuclear-free. That would mean that nuclear weapons could be located temporarily on Diego Garcia but not stored there.

 

These restrictions would surely be ignored in the event of a crisis, but they are yet another problem that would have been avoided if the U.K. had behaved responsibly and not disturbed the status quo in the first place. After all, Mauritius was in no position to drive it out. Possession is, as quite a few U.N. members have demonstrated over the years, nine-tenths of the law. With the Chinese lurking nearby and, for that matter, the implications of Britain’s surrender for territories from the Falklands to Gibraltar, that is worth remembering.

 

Britain’s government, for reasons that probably owe more to disdain for the imperial past and a pathetic desire to curry evanescent approval in Turtle Bay than to any rational considerations, appears weirdly insistent on forcing this deal through despite the political storm it has stirred up at home.

 

For its part, the Trump administration backed the handover last year. More recently, the president described it as an “act of great stupidity.” He has since softened his position, describing the deal “as the best [Keir Starmer] could make.” That’s generous. The best deal would be no deal, and Starmer should act accordingly. Unfortunately, the argument (there is one) that the U.S. has a legal right to veto the proposed agreement is unlikely to succeed. Moreover, an open battle with Britain over the transfer could well be counterproductive, unless the U.K. quietly agrees to using an American bad cop to throw a wrench in the works. The chances of that are remote, and so, rather than undertaking an uphill legal struggle, the administration should, without coming across as a bully, step up political pressure on Starmer to change course. If that fails, the U.S. must just make the best of it.