Starmer should hand over the Chagos Islands but offer Trump more talks on Diego Garcia
Allies back the US base on Diego Garcia but don’t back the UK’s claim to sovereignty over the Chagos Islands– Starmer has to square that circle and square the Trump administration too
Published by the LSE British Politics and Policy Blog under the title What should Starmer do about the Chagos Islands?
The Chagos Islands were administered as part of the UK’s Colony of Mauritius until 1965. In that year they were detached from Mauritius under an agreement with the latter’s government to become the British Indian Ocean Territory, with a view to their largest Island, Diego Garcia, being used for a US military base. Mauritius became independent in 1968.
The base on Diego Garcia is as strategically important to the US and its allies now, with the prospect of increasing Chinese assertiveness in the Indian Ocean, as it was when the Revolutionary Guards took over in Iran in 1979.
International political pressures – discussed below- pushed the Governments of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer into discussing a transfer of sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, coupled with a 99-year lease of Diego Garcia to the UK.
The UK and Mauritius announced a political agreement in October last year, with the backing of both President Joe Biden and India. India is a US ally which backs the Diego Garcia base but does not recognise the UK’s title to the Chagos Islands. There are numerous other countries which share this apparently asymmetrical approach.
After a change of Government in Mauritius in November last year, negotiations on the Chagos Islands were reopened in December, with Mauritius seeking more rental for the Diego Garcia base than had previously been agreed. The rental issue seems to have been resolved in February this year, but details have yet to be published, with payments reported to be £9 billion over the 99 year term of the lease.
Prior to Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January this year, a coalition emerged against a transfer of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius between Trump allies and right-wing UK politicians.
Starmer delays formal conclusion of the Chagos deal
US opposition to the UK transfer of the Chagos Islands gave Starmer second thoughts and it was announced on 15 January that he had decided to suspend formal conclusion of the deal until the Trump administration had had a chance to express a view.
The issue is likely to come to a head when UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy meets Trump’s secretary of state Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February.
It would be wrong to think that the disagreement over the Chagos Islands and the future of the Diego Garcia base is simply one between liberals cherishing the international rule of law and hawks preferring realpolitik – there is no shortage of political realism behind the UK Government’s plan for the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia.
Not even allies believe in the UK’s title to the Chagos Islands
The problem for Starmer or any other UK Prime Minister – and perhaps something of a problem for Trump too – is that allies of the UK and the US around the world accept the strategic significance of Diego Garcia, want the base to go on doing the job it has been doing for the last half-century, but don’t think the UK has a good legal claim to the Chagos Islands.
In February 2019 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) handed down an Advisory Opinion which the UN General Assembly had requested two years before. The ICJ ruled that the UK had no title to the Chagos Islands and was bound to hand over their administration as soon as possible to Mauritius.
The fact that the ICJ Opinion was merely advisory with no binding effects on the UK provided UK politicians with a fig-leaf of sorts, but the geopolitical tide was clearly turning against the status quo.
The real problem for the UK was not so much that the judges of the ICJ thought that the UK had no title to the Chagos Islands. It was the fact that national governments around the world, including the closest allies of the UK and the US, thought that the judges were right.
Allies refused to back UK and US in UN Vote
Only a few months after the ICJ Opinion was handed down, the UN General Assembly voted by a wide margin to welcome the Court’s Opinion and demand that the UK hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
Donald Trump had led a UK/US diplomatic offensive in the UN in support of the UK’s title to the Islands. The initiative was not a success. Only three countries were willing to cast a vote in the UN General Assembly supporting the US and UK positions. All three were led by close political allies of Donald Trump - Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and Scott Morrison’s Australia.
Countries abstaining on the vote, but conspicuously not supporting the UK and US line on the Chagos Islands, included Canada, New Zealand, virtually the whole of NATO, and Indo-Pacific allies Japan and the Republic of Korea
Part of the explanation for all this is that plenty of US/UK allies were keen on keeping the status quo for the US Diego Garcia base, but didn’t think that this depended on the UK maintaining its claim to the Chagos Islands.
Mauritius had said in 2019 it would not interfere with the US base on Diego Garcia if the UK transferred sovereignty to it, and a few months later Mauritius offered a 99-year lease of Diego Garcia to the UK and the US jointly.
That was the backdrop to Starmer’s predecessor Rishi Sunak starting talks with Mauritius on sovereignty over Chagos and keeping the US base on Diego Garcia. After Starmer took office the talks continued.
Starmer’s deal puts the Diego Garcia base on a better legal footing than the status quo
Starmer might say with some justice that a deal recognising Mauritius’ sovereignty in exchange for a 99- year lease on Diego would do the US a favour. Instead of having a key US base dependent on a largely discredited UK claim, the US would have a watertight legal title for as long as anybody alive need worry about, and business as usual.
But this message is not getting through to some Republicans, who are calling on Trump to block the deal permanently, citing problems such as branches of Iranian universities in Mauritius being used to spy on Diego Garcia if the UK no longer governs the Chagos Islands. It is also argued that Starmer’s deal could lead to an increased Chinese commercial presence in the Chagos Islands, with risks of Chinese surveillance of the US base, or even of a Chinese military base in the Islands.
The difficulty with these arguments is that they overestimate the ability of UK claims to sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to prevent surveillance of Diego Garcia or even a Chinese base in the Islands in future years. Neither Mauritius nor China, nor for that matter any significant allies of the US and UK, recognise the validity of UK claims over the Chagos Islands. The conduct of Mauritius and China is unlikely to be decisively affected by claims to sovereignty they and so many others reject.
The existence of an effective US base on Diego Garcia depends on US determination to defend it against all comers. What is needed – and what Starmer has taken a long step towards providing – is a legal and political wrapper for that presence that most countries will respect rather than one which they don’t.
Starmer could include Trump in further talks on Diego Garcia
The UK’s only security interest in the Chagos Islands is as a home for the US base on Diego Garcia. The base accommodates thousands of US military and civilian personnel along with 40 or so British sailors and marines posted there .
The US has to date made no direct payment for Diego Garcia but UK consent to the establishment of the base led to a discount from the US Government on the acquisition of the UK’s submarine-launched nuclear deterrent. The UK is highly dependent on US military cooperation, and UK payments for a lease of Diego Garcia will be seen by the UK Government as investing in a relationship with the US which pays military dividends.
It is accordingly important for the UK that any deal with Mauritius on Diego Garcia is squared with the Trump administration.
For Trump to persuade Starmer to return to the status quo ante would be a retrograde step, and the best option for Starmer would be to convince Trump that the present deal is fit for purpose.
A fall-back option would be for Starmer to reopen negotiations with Mauritius on the Diego Garcia lease, and to include Trump in the process. Negotiations could focus on the length of the lease and on security matters such as exclusion zones around the base to address the risk of surveillance. Any improvement in the present deal from the US point of view could be claimed as a victory by Trump, and a win for Trump would be a win for UK/US relations. It would also be a win for the security interests of the UK in the Indo-Pacific. On this occasion, what is good for the US is likely to be good for the UK too.
Derrick Wyatt, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Oxford