Why U.K.’s Starmer Plans To Give Away Diego Garcia

Fealty to ”international law” could cost more than $11 billion, help China, hurt U.S.

[The Editors is called The Editors, plural, not The Editor, singular, for a reason. When I launched it, a shrewd friend advised, “it can’t just be you.” I’m delighted to start including some additional voices. Today’s comes from Michael Mosbacher, who is associate comment editor at London’s Daily Telegraph. He is a past editor of Standpoint and The Critic, having co-founded both British magazines.—Ira Stoll.]

The Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance facility in Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory is one of three operational sites worldwide. The facility tracks known manmade deep space objects in orbit around Earth. (U.S. Air Force photo)

Britain’s once vast empire is now reduced to 14 territories with a combined population of less than 300,000 — mostly Caribbean islands, but also including Gibraltar at the tip of Spain, Napoleon’s spot of final exile Saint Helena in the mid-Atlantic, and the Falkland Islands of the war in 1982.

Of these remaining colonies, the Chagos Islands, or more legalistically, the British Indian Ocean Territory, is perhaps the most obscure. It is, though, developing into a real point of tension between the Trump administration and Keir Starmer’s Labour government. The brewing conflict illustrates the sharply different world views of the American president and the British prime minister.

The Chagos Islands matter to the U.S., as the largest of them, Diego Garcia, is a joint U.S.-U.K. military base, in truth basically an American facility with a limited British presence. Starmer’s government is planning to dissolve the British Indian Ocean Territory and hand over the islands to Mauritius, 1,300 miles away in East Africa. Then the U.K. would lease back Diego Garcia for 99 years — at a hefty price totaling at least £9 billion (more than $11.3 billion) and arguably double that. (Mauritius has suggested the payments will be index linked and go up each year, although the U.K. denies it).

Starmer’s desire to sign such an unsatisfactory and one-sided deal is to ensure that the U.K. complies with the wishes of a rather dubious 2019 advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice. That judgment was then backed up by a U.N. General Assembly vote opposed by just three countries—the U.K., U.S., and—you guessed it—Israel.