Chagos Islands for Sale
If Trump is looking to add American territory, why not step into the UK’s farcical negotiations with Mauritius?
Since returning to power, Donald Trump has shown a great deal of interest in expanding the territory of the United States. Though the seriousness of his interest is unclear, Trump has caused frustration, consternation, and amusement among various parties by talking about acquiring Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, or even making Canada the 51st state. While none of these seem realistic, there is one territory which may be for sale that Trump does not seem to have considered: the Chagos Islands, also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). These islands are home to Diego Garcia, our most important Indian Ocean military installation. What’s more, in some sort of bizarre national humiliation ritual, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is currently trying to pay the island nation of Mauritius, the erstwhile home of the dodo bird, to take the territory off of their hands. By attempting to cede this territory to Mauritius for no good reason, the United Kingdom has proven an unreliable partner in the “British” military base that was built specifically for American use. While ending the American Empire entirely would be desirable, as that seems off the table, attempting to buy the Chagos Islands provides a reasonable and justifiable outlet for Trump’s expansionist impulses.
The story of the Chagos Islands is infamous in anti-imperial circles, as it was the site of one of the most shameful episodes of the Cold War, a story memorably told in a film by the legendary documentarian John Pilger. In short, the United States wanted an uninhabited island in the region, so the United Kingdom produced the fiction that the Chagos Islanders were temporary workers, despite the fact that the small population, a mix of what had been East African slaves and South Asian “coolies,” had been there as far back as the late 18th century. They were deported en masse in the early 1960s and never properly compensated because to acknowledge they were displaced would have run afoul of treaties regarding non-self governing peoples. Since then, they have lived in exile, primarily in Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the United Kingdom itself. They were not consulted about this new deal, and while it’s said they may be able to return to some outlying islands, their current population has neither the resources nor the skills to survive on tiny islands or rebuild settlements now consumed by jungle.
The Diego Garcia base, which was put in place for the United States, has historically been secretive and inaccessible, though journalists were allowed to go recently to visit some Sri Lankan migrants who washed up and got put in detention on the island, becoming part of a years-long legal saga. The base is known to host over 2,000 U.S. personnel, with around 40 service members from the UK on the island who are said to administer the base, maintaining the delicate balance in the nominally British but actually American installation. It has been used for a variety of conflicts around the region, as it provides access to Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Crucially, it is one of the few bases in the world capable of re-arming nuclear armed submarines, though the size of its stockpile of nuclear warheads stored on the island is unknown. In 2022, in an unusual move, the U.S. Navy announced that the USS West Virginia had stopped at the island as part of an extended deterrence patrol; the purpose of this was to show other powers that nuclear-armed submarines are regularly at the island. The base at Diego Garcia is a key United States access point for perhaps 1/8th of the globe.
It is not clear what madness would cause the Labour Government to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius while paying them for a 99-year U.S. lease. The crux of Mauritius’s argument is that the Chagos Islands were administered from Mauritius during the colonial era, though they specifically agreed to not pursue this claim when they were granted independence. Besides that coincidence of history, Mauritius has no connection to the Chagos Islands other than some of the former residents being on their island.
International agreements about decolonization prohibited powers from breaking up colonies without a vote of the people. This has little to do with Mauritius, since the United Kingdom’s stance was that these islands were uninhabited—which, to be clear, is easily proven to have been an intentional lie—but the Chagossians would be the people with the right to vote on it, not the people of Mauritius. It is perhaps unprecedented in the annals of history to pay a much weaker country to take a territory, but Labour is set on proving an obviously hypocritical point about international law.
Within the United Kingdom, everyone is blaming everyone else for this coming to pass. Labour points out that the Conservatives were taking part in these negotiations, and argues that this somehow tied their hands, although they could have just not proceeded. The now out-of-power Conservatives all blame each other for any action they took on the matter. Meanwhile, nationalists within the United Kingdom are angry and humiliated due to the absurdity of the whole thing. Reform Party Leader Nigel Farage pointed out that ceding sovereignty of these islands to Mauritius makes the United Kingdom much less useful to America—-and has just said that he would rather sell them in America than see this deal go through. (Of course, being a leading U.S. vassal is the only way in which the United Kingdom maintains significant global political power.)
The primary concern that is expressed about Mauritius gaining sovereignty of the Chagos Islands is China encroaching on the U.S. base. While it isn’t reasonable to imagine that China could or would try to build a naval base, in part because the United States is already using the only appropriate site, it is possible that fishing or mineral rights could be leased in a way that allows spying. That is the most reasonable national security concern put forward, but it must be admitted that regardless of what happens it is unlikely that the United States loses the base in our lifetime in any way besides agreeing to leave, mostly because only an enormous Pearl Harbor–style attack could possibly dislodge the U.S. position.
In September, the Chagos Island deal had the approval of the parties in power in all three stakeholder countries, most notably the Biden administration, but shortly after it was signed the Mauritian prime minister who made the deal lost power, and of course Donald Trump was elected. The United Kingdom has been eager to make the transfer, but only with American consent. At the same time, the new government of Mauritius is trying to make the United Kingdom pay more of the reported 9 billion pounds up front as well as adjust it for inflation over the next 99 years, making the total cost much higher than 9 billion nominal pounds over the course of the contract. For some reason, in late February, after meeting with Starmer, Trump announced that he was “inclined” to accept the deal, which seems quite out of character for the president, who was expected to oppose the deal. In October, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the deal a “serious threat” in his capacity as a senator back in October. The reality is that the base was built with the belief that the United Kingdom would continue to own it, with no risk of some tiny nation with nominal sovereignty potentially causing us endless annoyance or threatening to give China access to the other islands in the territory.
In many ways, there isn’t a great reason to buy the BIOT from the United Kingdom, given that they are willing to pay the lease to Mauritius and that it would be impossible to dislodge our base. We could just as well take Mauritius on as a dependency. On the other hand, Donald Trump has shown tremendous interest in expanding the United States’ territorial holdings, and compared to going after Greenland or Canada, buying the BIOT is imminently reasonable. Diego Garcia is a key part of our current security strategy, including the “nuclear triad,” has no people left to displace or incorporate into our country, and the owners are trying to get rid of it because they can’t take the pressure of periodic resolutions about international law. While the British nationalists may wish to keep it, Labour has shown that the United Kingdom is not to be relied upon in this matter, and it is undeniably less of a national humiliation for them to sell a distant rocky outcropping than to pay a former colony to take it.
If Donald Trump is serious about acquiring territory, he should stop chasing whimsies and enter negotiations to buy the one piece of crucial real estate that may actually be available to purchase.
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