The Chagos Islands Handover Is a Gift to China

Earlier this month, the British government, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, announced an agreement to hand over the Chagos Islands, a British overseas territory located in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius. The islands are home to a joint British/American military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island. While the agreement provides for the base to remain, the deal is a disaster.

The Chagos islands are, beyond the military base, uninhabited. Descendants of indentured Indians and African slaves, brought by the French in the late 18th century, used to live there until the 1960s, when they were expelled by the U.K. to make room for the military base. The U.K. has long since conceded that this was an outrageous error and in 1982 provided compensation to the expelled islanders.

There is no good reason to hand the islands over to Mauritius, a country with close ties with China. Mauritius was in fact the first African country to sign a free trade agreement with China. That deal went into effect in 2021, and Mauritian exports to China increased by 70 percent in the first year. China is also Mauritius’ second largest country for imports. Chinese investors have made no secret of their interest in Mauritius as a gateway to the growing African market.

While China’s aggressive economic expansion on the African continent should worry the West, the vulnerable status of Diego Garcia is equally concerning. The base has been a key node for air forces during U.S. military operations in the Middle East. The idea that China could, even hypothetically, meddle with U.S. military operations in the Middle East is a chilling prospect. Imagine if after 9/11 George W. Bush had been forced to call and plead with Beijing before being able to launch the invasion of Afghanistan, to make sure they would not interfere.

The 1956 Suez crisis, when Britain invaded Egypt only to be forced to a humiliating climbdown merely days later owing to international pressure and its no-longer-stellar navy and air force, is generally agreed upon as the event that marked the end of the British empire. The handover of Chagos islands—which the Biden administration cheered—brings the United States closer to its own Suez crisis.

One of China’s problems, as noted by the Pentagon, has been its inability to project force in the Indian Ocean. While supporters of the deal celebrate that it leaves the Diego Garcia base in place, it does not prevent Mauritius from leasing any of the other Chagos islands to China, nor from allowing Chinese military vessels from traversing the area around the base. Besides, leases can be broken, and it is difficult to imagine a country that folded on handing over the islands refusing to allow a lease to be prematurely annulled. After all, the U.K. reached an agreement with Mauritius back in 1967 that saw Mauritius accept the loss of the islands in exchange for independence and financial compensation, yet here we are. 

Even stronger provisions against Chinese influence would mean nothing once the handover was complete. Any guarantees to limit Chinese influence are as worthless as the guarantees China granted to Britain when Hong Kong was handed over in 1997. 

How did it come to this? The Biden administration reportedly pressured the U.K. into the handover out of concern the Diego Garcia base would fall into enemy hands if Britain were forced to give up the islands. The International Court of Justice did rule in favor of Mauritius in 2019 on this issue, but the ICJ has no binding jurisdiction unless granted so by both parties in a dispute (and the U.K. had not granted jurisdiction). Mauritius does not even have a separate military, relying instead on its 12,500-member police force to carry out all the functions of police, coast guard, and military. The idea that it could ever take Diego Garcia, or any other island by force, is of course laughable. 

Handing over the Chagos islands is a terrible idea in and of itself, but doing so on the pretense that one must obey the International Court of Justice is arguably far worse. What happens if the ICJ rules that the U.K. must hand over the Falkland islands, or Gibraltar, or allow another Scottish independence referendum? Having fought for years to take back sovereignty from the EU, the British government under Starmer has now established a precedent that what is and isn’t British territory is a matter to be decided by a foreign court. This precedent has not been lost on those powers who wish to seize British overseas territories, nor on the inhabitants of those territories who are now utterly terrified of suffering the same fate as the Chagos islands.

Adding insult to injury, Mauritius’ case was always weak, its argument hinging on the fact that Mauritius and the Chagos Islands were governed by the same colonial administration while under British rule, and thus should not have been separated when Mauritius gained its independence. As part of the British empire, Mauritius was indeed governed by the same colonial administration as the Chagos islands. This, however, was also the case for India and Pakistan, as well as Australia and New Zealand, which were for a long time grouped together as one colony. There are many other examples, including French West Africa, which eventually was split into eight countries. The Chagos islands are geographically far away (1,200 miles) from Mauritius, and, as mentioned earlier, the U.K. already compensated Mauritius. Moreover, despite Mauritius’ claim of close cultural ties and friendship with the Chagossian people, Chagossians living in Mauritius report facing discrimination and xenophobia to this day.

This agreement is a stark reminder that both Starmer and Biden are leaders who lack confidence in the West. They see themselves as leaders whose task is managing the decline. Starmer (and presumably Biden) has clearly been taken aback by the criticism of the deal, as the very idea that keeping the Chagos islands permanently was even an option is incredulous to someone with his worldview. 

Yet, while anti-colonialization activists in the foreign offices in both London and Washington may wish to undo what they view as one of the crimes of colonialism, this deal in fact commits another one. During the age of colonialism, European powers would frequently trade, redivide, and cede colonies among one another, with no regard for the wishes of the people living in the affected colonies. What the U.K., eagerly encouraged by the U.S., is now doing is little different: The Chagossian islanders themselves and their descendants who were expelled during the 1960s have not been given a vote on the deal. In fact, they were not even consulted during the process of negotiating the agreement.

This has understandably reopened wounds left by the original expulsion, and prominent Chagossians are now speaking out against the deal. While they did want the right to return to their islands, they wanted to do so under British governance with an arrangement similar to that of the Falkland Islands.

Keir Starmer will, barring unforeseen events, govern the U.K. until at least 2029 when his term expires. Meanwhile in the United States, the choice in less than 30 days is between a candidate who shares Biden’s worldview, and, in the other corner, a candidate who believes economic and foreign policy isolationism will restore America to some mythological era of past greatness. And so the remainder of this decade will see Chinese aggression continue. Allowing the Chagos Islands to be gobbled up by a Chinese-influenced state may, in the end, prove to be a mere appetizer before the main course of Taiwan is served.