The UK recognises that the new Trump team has the right to review the deal’s implications for its base at Diego Garcia, but hope that the Pentagon officials who cleared the deal under Biden will maintain their previous support in their new advice to the new defence secretary, Peter Hegseth.
If no deal was struck, the UK argues the Chinese could use the legally disputed status of the islands to start building listening posts or bases on the outer islands, creating a contested security environment in the Indian Ocean analogous to the current tensions in the South China Sea.
Keir Starmer is to urge Donald Trump to recognise that a US rejection of Mauritius’s legal claim to own the Chagos Islands including the strategic US military base at Diego Garcia may stoke tensions similar to those in the South China Sea.
But Starmer’s team also intend to raise the Chagos deal in which the UK pays the Mauritius government for a 99-year lease on the islands, a series of atolls in the Indian Ocean that have been described as Britain’s last African colony.
The UK is arguing a deal struck now that the UK government is confident will last the next 100 years is seen as a better way of taking the US lease on the base out of difficult geopolitics.
