By David Frum
Monday, March 02, 2026
During the planning for President Trump’s latest strike
on Iran, Britain refused to allow the United States to launch air attacks from
the U.S.-U.K. base at Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. Only a few
hours’ flying time from the Middle East, Diego Garcia offers airfields long
enough for the heaviest bombers and has naval docks large enough for aircraft
carriers and nuclear submarines. It is British territory, left over from
colonial times, but was jointly developed under a U.S.-U.K. agreement signed in
1966. Britain reversed its
veto against U.S. use of British bases yesterday, but only for what Prime
Minister Keir Starmer defined as “defensive” strikes. The delay and
restrictions have dealt a blow to the U.S.-U.K. alliance. Unfortunately,
Starmer’s Labour government seems bent on inflicting even harsher blows very
soon.
Britain’s veto seems to have been what prompted Trump’s outburst
on Truth Social on February 18, which ended with, “DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO
GARCIA!”
With this, Trump plunged into a controversy that has
polarized British politics but attracted curiously little attention in the
United States: the looming handover of Diego Garcia, the site of America’s most
important military base in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius, an African country
that has become economically dependent on China and India. Impelled by
postimperial guilt, the United Kingdom has insisted that this deal is an
inescapable necessity, given that Mauritius has found support for its claim to
Diego Garcia at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague. The treaty is
signed but cannot take effect without the backing of the United States, which
had at first accepted the British deal as a reasonable solution.
Yet the misgivings are well founded—even if they find an
unhelpful voice in Trump’s decision to blast the treaty as an “act of GREAT
STUPIDITY.” Escaping the trap that Britain and the U.S. have created for
themselves will require far more than rage-posting.
***
Diego Garcia is the southernmost island in the Chagos
Archipelago, which has been ruled by Britain since the early 19th century. The
islands are also claimed by Mauritius, some 1,300 miles southwest of Diego
Garcia. In May 2025, after decades of dispute and then years of negotiations
following the 2019 ICJ ruling, the two sides came to an agreement. Britain
would surrender sovereignty over the archipelago to Mauritius. Mauritius would
then lease Diego Garcia alone back to Britain for 99 years. Mauritius would
gain rights to use the other islands in the Chagos chain, but agreed not to
lease any of them to a third nation without British approval.
Proponents say
that the treaty protects the base and complies with international law.
Opponents counter that Mauritius’s claim to the islands is weak and
unenforceable. They worry
that the little republic has been granted dangerous rights over U.S. security
decisions—and that the country’s strong ties to China and India make it an
unreliable security partner for the U.S. and U.K.
Britain has long accepted that the United States must
agree to any change to the islands’ legal status. This means that Trump needn’t
rant and rave on social media to stop the “give away” of Diego Garcia; he could
kill the treaty himself. Yet Trump has not done that. Instead, the Trump State
Department has repeatedly endorsed
the deal to end British sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago. Trump himself
has praised those negotiations too. Even his February 18 post is phrased as a
personal opinion, as if the decision belonged exclusively to Britain. “Prime
Minister Starmer should not lose control, for any reason, of Diego Garcia, by
entering a tenuous, at best, 100 Year Lease. This land should not be taken away
from the U.K. and, if it is allowed to be, it will be a blight on our Great
Ally.”
The day of Trump’s online outburst, a reporter asked
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt whether the administration now
opposed the Chagos treaty it had previously supported. She explained that
Trump’s post was the official policy of the U.S. government, “straight from the
horse’s mouth.” She did not, however, clarify whether the post amounted to a
U.S. veto. In other words, she seemed as baffled as everybody else.
***
While the world waits to learn whether Trump’s words
amount to an actual change of U.S. policy, or are merely a disgruntled man’s
opinion, Americans should understand the origins of the Chagos treaty—and its
hazards.
Before the arrival of European settlers, both Mauritius
and the Chagos islands were uninhabited by humans. Mauritius was named by Dutch
explorers for their ruling prince, Maurice; the Chagos were named by Portuguese
seafarers, probably for the Portuguese word for Christ’s wounds: chagas.
Mauritius was the home of the famous dodo bird, whose
forest habitat would be destroyed by sugar plantations—first under Dutch rule,
then French—worked by slaves from Madagascar and mainland Africa. The Chagos
were used to farm coconuts, also by slave labor. The British seized both
Mauritius and the Chagos islands during the Napoleonic Wars with France, then
formalized their sovereignty at the peace conferences that ended those
conflicts.
The British Parliament outlawed slave trafficking in
1807, abolished slavery outright in 1833, and then compensated slaveholders.
Cash in hand, the sugarcane planters of Mauritius replaced their slaves with
contract labor from the Indian subcontinent. As the sugarcane industry
expanded, skilled workers and entrepreneurs from India came to manage the needs
of the growing colony. When Mauritius became independent in 1968, a large and
growing share of its nearly 800,000 residents were of Indian origin.
The atolls and rocks that made up the Chagos Archipelago
offered more meager economic possibilities. When slavery ended, the coconut
farms paid scant wages to the workers and their children. By the 1960s, fewer
than 1,000 people lived in the Chagos Archipelago, almost all of them
descendants of enslaved Africans. Whereas Mauritius was four-fifths Hindu or
Muslim, the people of the Chagos were almost uniformly Roman Catholic.
For administrative convenience, Britain had ruled the Chagos Archipelago
from the Crown colony of Mauritius, as France had done before it. But this
presented an awkward problem in the 1950s and ’60s, when the British began
decolonizing their African territories. The British had built an airstrip on
Diego Garcia during World War II. The Americans now sought to lease and
modernize that base. With the advent of long-range bombers, Diego Garcia’s
location in the middle of the Indian Ocean was no longer remote, but central.
The Americans wanted Britain, not Mauritius, as the landlord for the ambitious
air and naval base they had planned. In 1965, the British detached the Chagos
islands from Mauritius, then named the archipelago as the British Indian Ocean
Territory.
Advocates for Mauritius now complain that this was an
unjust act. At the time, however, Mauritius took a more relaxed view. According
to an account by the former director of the Seychelles islands’ national
archives, the Mauritius colonial government reacted to the British proposition
by asking to swap the Chagos Archipelago for ownership of the Seychelles, then
another British colony in the Indian Ocean. The British had ruled the
Seychelles from Mauritius from 1814 to 1903, then severed it to form a separate
colony. (The Seychelles gained independence in the 1970s.) If one severance was
legal, why not the other? Upon being told that the return of the Seychelles was
impossible, the Mauritius government accepted 3 million pounds in compensation
for the Chagos chain, about $100 million today.
The Americans, worried about a future independence
movement on the Chagos islands, insisted that the new British Indian Ocean
Territory be emptied of its residents. The British duly closed the last of the
coconut farms and, from 1967 to 1973, removed the Chagossians to Mauritius and
the Seychelles, where many suffered extreme poverty. The constitution of the
British Indian Ocean Territory specifies that no one has a right of abode on
the islands. My Atlantic colleague Cullen Murphy has written
movingly about the sense of displacement felt by the Chagossians and their
descendants to this day.
In 1972 and 1982, the British government put millions
more into a trust fund for the hundreds of Chagossians removed to Mauritius.
(The Chagossians in the Seychelles got nothing.) The 1982 payment was presented
by Britain as a “final settlement.” Mauritius at first took the view that the
funds were meant to offset the government’s costs of absorbing the Chagossians.
When payments did at last flow to Chagossian families, their value was much
corroded by the inflation of the Mauritian rupee.
In time, Chagossians found ways to immigrate to Britain.
They built a community in West Sussex, near Gatwick airport, where many found
work. Because British Chagossians were largely concentrated in one
parliamentary constituency, their plight became a political matter. In 2002, an
act
of Parliament granted British citizenship to Chagossians and their children
in Britain, amounting to a few thousand people. Groups of British Chagossians
have lately engaged in acts of civil disobedience to reassert a right to return
to the outer Chagos islands, but as British citizens living under British law
on British soil.
***
Mauritius is one of the most successful countries in the
55-member African Union. Its GDP
per capita is second only to that of the Seychelles. Elections occur
regularly, most recently in November 2024, and human rights are generally well
respected. Yet Mauritius faces many of the familiar problems of a postcolonial
society. For more than half of its independent existence, it has been ruled by
two generations of a single family named Ramgoolam. Corruption is a serious
concern: A former prime minister and a former chief of the central bank
were arrested in 2025 on money-laundering charges.
Still, Mauritius’s domestic policies are more in line
with American values than those of say, Qatar, which hosts large U.S.
installations. Mauritius’s foreign policy is what makes the country an
uncomfortable landlord for a major American military base. Mauritius signed a
free-trade agreement with China in 2019, China’s first with any African nation.
The Chinese communications company Huawei chose Mauritius as its African
regional hub. China financed the modernization of Mauritius’s airport, financed
and built the country’s most advanced dam, and covered much of the cost of
Mauritius’s largest stadium and sports center in 2018. Tiny Mauritius is now
one of the top five African destinations for Chinese investment, which is
especially impressive given that it is the only one of the five with no mineral
resources to develop. Mauritius has received two visits by Chinese presidents:
Hu Jintao, in 2009, and Xi Jinping, in 2018. In February, The
Telegraph reported that more than 6,000 Mauritian officials had
received various forms of training from China.
India, too, has financed important infrastructure
projects in Mauritius. Mauritius’s national security adviser and the head of
its naval force are both Indian military officers. In 2015, Mauritius leased
the island of Agalega—870 miles west of Diego Garcia—to India for development
as an air and naval base. Although India is more or less a security partner of
the United States and Britain today, that alliance may not always hold.
Mauritius’s deals with China and India may well make
sense for a small country trying to succeed in a region where the two emerging
powers loom large. But how much sway do Americans want to grant an island
nation that is attempting to appease China and India over a territory that
hosts the U.S. Navy and Air Force?
Although the agreement that Britain negotiated forbids
Mauritius from leasing other Chagos islands to anyone else, nothing is stopping
the country from building its own eavesdropping stations and selling the
information to buyers in Beijing or New Delhi—among many other concerns raised
by China- and India-watchers.
***
For a long time, Mauritius’s claims on the Chagos islands
made only slow diplomatic progress. But in 2017, Mauritius was able to elevate
a resolution about the matter to the United Nations’ General Assembly agenda,
urging that the conflict over these islands be referred to the ICJ. The motion
was well timed. Britain had voted the year before to leave the European
Union—burning goodwill with many former partners. And Trump, America’s new
president, had just scolded U.S. allies at his first NATO summit in Brussels.
So when Mauritius made mischief, America and Britain discovered themselves
short of friends. The UN resolution was adopted by a vote of 94 yeses, 16 no’s,
and 65 abstentions. Among those abstaining: nearly every EU member state, plus
non-EU NATO partners including Canada, Iceland, and Norway.
The matter duly went to the ICJ, which ruled in
Mauritius’s favor in February 2019. The ruling was strictly an advisory one.
But through a series of deft legal maneuvers—joined to the ever more ambitious
self-concepts of some international legal tribunals—Mauritius was able to win a
second legal victory at another international tribunal, for the law of the sea.
The British government interpreted these trends as deeply ominous for its hold
on the Chagos Archipelago.
In 2022, Britain announced
that it would enter negotiations with Mauritius. The election of a Labour
government in 2024 accelerated these negotiations. It probably did not hurt
that the lead lawyer for Mauritius at the time, Philippe Sands, is a close
friend of Prime Minister Starmer’s and a former law partner of Britain’s
attorney general, Richard Hermer.
***
The ICJ advisory ruling condemned Britain’s severance of
the Chagos islands as a “failure” of decolonization. Yet Mauritius’s ambitions
are no less colonial. Heedless of the wishes of the Chagossian diaspora,
Mauritius wants to reach across a thousand miles of ocean to claim territory to
which it has few ties other than the clerical imperatives of a bygone imperial
administration. Mauritius’s motive is not about peoplehood but about power: A
Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos will yield more income and influence than
Mauritius would on its own.
In the past, the reach of international public law was
limited by the ancient rule that no government can be bound by an international
tribunal without that government’s consent. But some international jurists
imagine international public law as a force that can and should evolve, apart
from and even independent of governments. They imagine this evolution as a
force that can replace grim power politics with ideals of justice, that can
restrain the strong and empower the weak. For them, Mauritius’s maneuvers to
adjudicate the status of the Chagos islands despite British objections offer a
thrilling glimpse of a better future.
The Chagos Archipelago case also exposes the core
weakness of the new approach to international public law. The methods used here
would obviously be futile against China. China occupies islands across the
South China Sea without even a figment of legal right. No court decision will
pry loose any of those holdings. China holds Tibet without noticeable bother,
commits crimes against its Uyghur Muslim minority with impunity, launches acts
of aggression against its neighbors in the South China Sea, and growls off any
court or tribunal that looks askance—which few do. As China gets stronger,
illusions about what international public law can do become both more dangerous
and more absurd.
The Chagos treaty demands considerable payments from
Britain to Mauritius: 101 million pounds a year, on average, for 99 years, much
more in the early years of the agreement, with complex adjustments for
inflation along the way. The British government estimates the net present value
of the payment stream at 3.4 billion pounds, but critics counter that the true
cost will be much higher. Regardless, Mauritius has collected payments from
Britain before, in 1965, 1972, and 1982, without feeling bound to stop asking
for more.
The text of the agreement, which calls on each party “to
ensure that in the implementation and application of this Agreement, including
activities in relation to the Base, there shall be compliance with
international law,” makes it easy for Mauritius to tangle the U.S. and the U.K.
in litigation anytime Mauritius (or any future ally or patron of Mauritius)
wishes to thwart U.S. military action from Diego Garcia.
Some may say that the U.S. has more than enough military
and economic clout to enforce its rights against a tiny country like Mauritius.
But 20 years from now, if and when China and India have grown only more
powerful, the U.S. may find its clout diminished. The treaty essentially signs
up the U.S. and U.K. for shakedowns forever. The British government is
currently too naive to imagine Mauritius abusing the treaty this way. Trump,
however, is cynical enough to foresee these future threats to the Anglo-American
advantage of the status quo.
***
Which brings us back to Trump’s rage-posting. What does
it accomplish? It does not veto the treaty. But Trump’s social-media opposition
does create a domestic political problem for Starmer. The British prime
minister’s net approval ratings have plunged in recent months to the lowest
levels ever tracked by British polling. The beneficiary of this plummet is
Britain’s right-wing Reform Party, a kind of MAGA proxy, led by Trump’s
longtime ally Nigel Farage. Reform cites the Chagos treaty as proof of the
fecklessness and weakness of not only the Labour Party but also the
Conservatives, who began negotiations with Mauritius. In short, Trump’s
outbursts are doing much more to boost the U.K.’s MAGA franchise than defend
America’s strategic position in the Indian Ocean.
Yet Chagos still amounts to one of those rare cases where
Trump may break something that actually deserves to be broken.
The goal of U.S. and U.K. diplomacy over Diego Garcia
should be to end Mauritius’s pretensions over the Chagos islands, not
legitimize them. The genuine wrongs to the exiled Chagossians should be
righted, but not by accepting a territorial wish list to supposedly benefit
people who never wanted to be governed by Mauritius in the first place. Guilt
for European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries should not become the
permission structure for new forms of imperialism.
Most Chagossians say in polls that they want to be
British. Some may wish to become Americans. Any money to be paid for the
benefit of Chagossians should be paid to Chagossians directly. Any money for
Mauritius should be paid to extinguish Mauritius’s claims—to make truly final
the settlements reached in 1965, 1972, and 1982—while leaving the Chagos
Archipelago securely and exclusively in British hands.
Under the American and British flags, Diego Garcia
defends the Indo-Pacific region against aggressors who do not trouble their
consciences about laws, pacts, or the rights of weaker nations. That’s more
than enough moral justification to keep the old flags flying.
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