Two Cheers for the Chagos Deal

Philip Cunliffe argues that the deal with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands is in the national interest, even if it was done for the wrong reasons.

The British government has finally relinquished its sovereign claim over the Chagos Islands, Britain’s last African colony. Although an international treaty has yet to be finalised Britain has in principle granted sovereignty over the islands to the neighbouring island state of Mauritius. At the same time, the UK will retain a 99-year lease, jointly held with the US, on Diego Garcia, the strategically-most significant of the Chagos Islands, as it is home to one of the most important US military bases in the world. Since the decision was announced, Britain has reaffirmed its sovereignty over Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, the two most well-known overseas territories that Britain still lays claim to. 

The Labour government of Keir Starmer has come under extensive criticism for the agreement with Mauritius. Reform leader Nigel Farage called for an immediate debate in parliament. Former Tory prime minister Boris Johnson denounced the decision as ‘political correctness’, and former Tory foreign secretary James Cleverly dubbed the deal ‘weak’. Yet the Tory record gives them very little ground on which to criticise Labour’s foreign policy. 

After all, it was the hapless Tory party that took nearly four years to enact the outcome of the 2016 referendum on Brexit and secede from the EU. The people criticising the British government today are the same ones who have been content for the US to retain ultimate control over Britain’s nuclear deterrent, and are happy to have questions of Britain’s defence and security decided in Brussels by NATO. The people complaining over Chagos are the same people who measure the extent of Britain’s international success by how many foreign oligarchs buy property in London and how many sheikhs send their children to Britain’s boarding schools. 

Given the Conservatives’ record of recurrently sacrificing Britain’s national interests, most of these criticisms should not be taken too seriously. Indeed, it has since come to light that most of the diplomatic negotiations over the Chagos Islands themselves occurred under previous Tory governments. For those who are more seriously concerned with defending Britain’s national interest, what are we to make of Sir Keir Starmer’s limited renunciation of the Chagos Islands, and what does it portend for the rest of Britain’s overseas territories? 

The first thing to note is that from start to finish, Britain’s policies in the islands have been effected at the behest of the US. Britain cleared hundreds of Chagossians from Diego Garcia back in the 1970s in order to accommodate the US base there. Today, the same logic prevails in the opposite direction: Keir Starmer very explicitly made US interests paramount in his defence of the decision to renounce the islands, and made clear that US interests took priority over any British interest. Starmer’s critics who imagine Britain is undercutting its US ally reveal how little they understand regional geopolitics, and more tellingly, that they are more committed to the US than they are to Britain itself. Shedding any association with British imperialism in the region will strengthen the US hold on Diego Garcia, as it will help defuse African states’ criticisms of continued colonialism, and smooth the path of US diplomacy in its struggle to roll-back growing Chinese influence with African states. For those concerned that Starmer’s renunciation of the Chagos Islands portends further concessions over British sovereignty in future, they need not worry. The fact that the decision would never have been made in London without explicit guidance from Washington, suggests that the renunciation of the Chagos Islands has no bearing on Starmer’s minimal capacity to defend Britain’s sovereign interests. Britain’s continued political dependence on the US looms larger than any imagined future retreat by Sir Keir.

Nonetheless, despite these inauspicious circumstances and the fact that Britain’s renunciation of the Chagos Islands has happened under the tutelage of  the US state department, there are still some limited reasons to welcome the decision. 

It is worth recalling that Britain’s overseas territories were mostly accumulated during recurrent trade wars with other European colonial powers over the course of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The islands occupied strategic points to support global shipping and strategic sea lanes. The Falklands offered a coaling station in the South Atlantic before the introduction of oil-powered ships. Gibraltar, which was seized during the 1701-1714 War of the Spanish Succession fought between France on the one side, and Britain, the Netherlands and Austria on the other, provided a choke point at the entry to the Mediterranean Sea, supporting Britain’s naval efforts across various European wars over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Chagos Islands themselves were seized by Britain as colonial booty following the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. 

The point of this history is to demonstrate that whatever the protestations of the Tory and globalist press about how integral the islands are to British identity, these territories were not acquired for reasons of sentimentality, or defence of culture, let alone as some kind of humanitarian gesture on behalf of the people who live there. These territories were taken for hard material and strategic interests – interests that are simply no longer there. Coal no longer powers ships, Britain has no global empire, and no capacity to defend global sea lanes by itself. There will be no dynastic wars fought in Western Europe to which owning Gibraltar would make a difference. Some have argued that renouncing the Chagos Islands is a strategic win for China – but this is only if one was as deluded as to think that the US navy needs the British military to help defend itself. In any case, it makes no difference to Britain whether China or the US controls Diego Garcia: Britain’s independence and prosperity is not at stake in the question of who owns a tiny territory so far from Britain’s shores.  

Stretching out Britain’s territory across the globe also stretches out Britain’s sovereign claims far beyond the capacity of the British people to defend or support. Even the Falklands / Malvinas, over which Britain successfully fought Argentina in 1982, were barely defensible, stretching the Royal Navy of the day to its limit – and that against a regime as militarily-weak and politically-ramshackle as General Galtieri’s junta. To this day, Britain spends tens of millions of pounds every year to subsidise these remote and sparsely-inhabited islands. In any case, the political gains of renouncing these territories far outweigh the financial savings to the exchequer. Pulling back from our overseas territories pulls our governing elite back from their globalist commitments, giving them fewer reasons to discount our national interests in favour of imagining that Britain counts for something in the global cockpit of world affairs in the Indo-Pacific. 

While it is certainly true that the views and interests of the Falklanders and Chagossians about how they want to live and under whose jurisdiction should always be considered – as indeed should those of all who live in any British territory – there is no reason that these tiny populations should be granted a veto over the rights of the British nation as a whole; and needless to say the overwhelming majority of Britons live in Britain, not its overseas territories. Mauritian sovereign claims to the Chagos Islands may have no more historic validity than Britain’s, but Mauritius does have the claim that it was administered alongside the Chagos Islands as a single entity on the eve of its independence from Britain in 1968, and, more importantly, the Mauritians live in the Indian Ocean. Britain is in the North Atlantic.

Anyone serious about defending British sovereignty and territorial integrity should not constrain the British nation by over-committing or squandering British resources for territory that no longer serves our national interest. Even if it was true that defending Britain’s liberties was once served by maintaining a global navy and open sea lanes, it is no longer. Today, not only is this beyond the capacity of the British nation to do alone, but more importantly, British liberties are far more imperilled by embroiling the nation in forever wars and new geopolitical rivalries at the behest of foreign powers we have no capacity to bend to our will. Even if the renunciation of the Chagos Islands was done at the behest of the US rather than our own national interests, Britons concerned with Britain itself should welcome this limited step, and hope that Starmer’s protests about keeping Gibraltar and the Falklands are as credible as his claim to support Brexit. Renouncing the Chagos Islands helps us to trim our sails, putting the British people in a better position to take advantage of the winds of the day and face the storms of tomorrow.