It is hard to imagine an island less like Greenland than Diego Garcia, a lush coral horseshoe halfway between Africa and Indonesia.
Both lands host American military bases. But, whereas the United States has run down its Greenland garrison, it has wisely upgraded its presence in the Chagos Islands, the archipelago of which Diego Garcia is the chief island. That cluster could not be more strategically located, lying within reach of four of the seven global choke points that funnel maritime traffic: the Bab al Mandab Strait, the Strait of Hormuz, the Malacca Strait, and the Cape of Good Hope.
The Anglo-American base has proved its value again and again. In 1991, waves of B-52s took off from Diego Garcia to bomb Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. A goodly part of the campaign against the Taliban was waged from there 10 years later. The base stands as the supreme physical manifestation of the U.S.-U.K. alliance, under whose aegis freedom flourishes across the continents. With Iran collapsing, and China busily building runways over every coral reef it can enlarge, its importance is growing.
Incredibly, the British government, which owns the islands, is trying to give them to Mauritius and then lease them back, in defiance of the advice of both British and American generals. One of the earliest acts of the incoming Labour government was to propose a deal whereby Britain would pay Mauritius to rent the base for 99 years.
Last week, President Donald Trump called the deal “an act of great stupidity,” and, on this question, who can doubt that he is right? Indeed, when he made those remarks, he was under the impression that Britain was selling the archipelago. It was beyond his conception that anyone might actually pay to give territory away.
What lies behind the act of great stupidity? Mainly, the fact that Britain is governed by a clique of human rights lawyers.
Some history: The only people to have lived permanently on the archipelago were African plantation workers, brought in as slaves by the French, and freed by the British after they took the territory in 1814. In 1965, while quitting its other African colonies, Britain kept the Chagos Islands because the U.S. saw the value of a joint base.
To put its sovereignty beyond doubt, the United Kingdom paid Mauritius to renounce any claim. The Mauritian prime minister of the time, Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, later said he had been delighted to sell, “a territory of which very few people knew, which is very far from here, and which we had never visited”. He had a point — the Chagos Islands are more than 1,300 miles from Mauritius, lying much closer to the Maldives.
Those matters rested until some 15 years ago, when Mauritius began to draw closer to China. It revived its claim and won an advisory ruling from the International Court of Justice, which at that time included a Russian and a Chinese judge. That opinion should not have mattered because the ICJ is expressly denied jurisdiction in such cases. But the woke officials in Britain’s foreign office, seeing a dispute between a richer country and a poorer one, a whiter and a browner, rushed to comply. Naturally, some of the permanent officials at the State Department agreed, overlooking the danger that Mauritius might lease one of the smaller islands to China, notionally for civilian use.
Even in woke terms, though, their argument failed. For the genuinely wronged party here, the indigenous Chagossians who had been removed to make room for the base after 1968, made very clear that they had no desire to be ruled by Mauritius. What they wanted, perfectly reasonably, was to be allowed to return as British citizens to the outer atolls (they accept that Diego Garcia itself is off limits).
DAN HANNAN: THE WESTERN ALLIANCE IS BROKEN BEYOND REPAIR
Driven by their weird decolonization imperatives, British ministers poured their energies into handing over the territory. Prime Minister Keir Starmer used up a lot of diplomatic capital to persuade the U.S. to go along with the deal. Until last week, the Trump administration was taking the attitude that, if the Brits wanted to harm themselves this way, that was too bad.
Then, perhaps seeing parallel arguments with the bases in Greenland, Trump changed his position, and the handover cannot go ahead without U.S. acquiescence. If the president sticks to his guns, he will delight the Chagossians as well as the British, preserve the world’s finest marine conservation area, and ensure that the Anglosphere retains its presence in the Indian Ocean. I am sorry to be so blunt, but, as any U.S. general will tell you, this matters vastly more than who has notional sovereignty over Greenland.