How to solve a problem like the Chagos Islands

Very soon – as soon as the mutual courtesies now being exchanged between the new American President and his British counterpart are over – our government is likely to be at loggerheads with Donald Trump over our plan to cede the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), the Chagos archipelago, to Mauritius, then take out a long and expensive lease on the island of Diego Garcia so we can secure the operational status of our base there. This accommodates an American base of great importance to US defence.

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The agreement with the new Mauritian government has yet to be signed. It has been widely criticised here in the United Kingdom as surrendering what is ours; but our government has accepted a 2019 advisory judgment by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that Britain should not have kept the BIOT when in 1968 we granted independence to our former colony of Mauritius, because the islands (though far distant from Mauritius) belonged rightfully to Mauritius.

The United States, meanwhile, in the person of its new President and his team, is now fiercely opposed to the deal, believing that Mauritius’s links with China threaten the future security of its base; not least because Mauritius will control the other islands in the archipelago, and the seas around them.

That this columnist shares the dissatisfaction felt both within Britain and on the other side of the Atlantic about this proposed deal is beside the point. To conclude the deal is now the declared policy of His Majesty’s Government (HMG). Trump has set his face against it, and the Americans, who have ignored ICJ rulings before, would do so again in this case without many qualms.