An aerial view of the military base on Diego Garcia, in the Chagos Islands. The United Kingdom currently owns the Chagos Islands, and the UK and the US have shared the military base on Diego Garcia since the 1970s. The UK is planning to transfer sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius. (Shutterstock/Kev1ar82)

Why Donald Trump Is Right to Intervene in the UK’s Chagos Islands Deal 

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Ceding the islands to a smaller nation and leasing back Diego Garcia, home to a key US and UK military base, comes with long-term risks.

President Donald Trump’s recent warning to Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the proposed Chagos Islands deal is not bluster. It is a strategic intervention at precisely the right moment. If anything, it may have saved Britain from one of the most consequential geopolitical miscalculations of the postwar era. 

The US and the UK have shared a military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos Islands, since the 1970s. As I previously argued in the Washington Examiner, Diego Garcia is not an obscure colonial relic but a cornerstone of Western power projection in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East.

The proposed agreement would see the United Kingdom transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius while leasing back the base for nearly a century at a cost reportedly running into the billions. This is being framed in London as a legal tidy-up, a necessary act of post-colonial housekeeping. In reality, it is a profound strategic surrender dressed up as moral rectitude.

Trump is correct to oppose it for three core reasons: deterrence credibility, alliance coherence, and systemic competition with China.

First, deterrence rests not merely on capabilities but on control. Diego Garcia’s value lies in its political reliability. It has functioned for decades as a secure, uncontested platform for American bombers, naval logistics, intelligence operations, and contingency planning. It played pivotal roles in operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and remains critical to Indo-Pacific force posture.

A sovereign transfer........

© The National Interest