Trump Blocks Britain’s Chagos Folly
POTUS confronts the strategic blunder that London should never have made, effectively handing the alliance's most important Indian Ocean base to China.
by Rod D. Martin and Bepi Pezzulli
January 26, 2026
On the heels of Donald Trump’s assertion that the UK’s handover of the Chagos Islands was “an act of great stupidity”, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has officially withdrawn the enabling legislation.
It’s about time.
Starmer once presented the transfer as a neat diplomatic housekeeping exercise. It has turned into a rolling crisis of strategy, law, and political competence. The Prime Minister’s decision to surrender the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, leasing back Diego Garcia, collides with parliamentary upheaval, American anger, and a growing sense that the government has blundered into a trap of its own making.
To many, the deal is simply incomprehensible. The largely uninhabited islands have belonged to Britain for centuries. Such Chagossians as remain, descendants of the prior inhabitants, oppose the transfer of the islands from the UK to Mauritius. The islands host the joint UK/U.S. Diego Garcia base, the alliance’s most important base in the entire region, whereas the new owners are increasingly under China’s sway. And just for good measure, Starmer’s Socialists intend to pay Mauritius an enormous sum to take the islands.
Wait, what?!
Can it get worse? Well, it turns out it can. The transfer is widely seen as violating the 1966 UK-U.S. treaty that led to the establishment of Diego Garcia, a treaty that requires Britain to maintain its sovereignty and arguably gives the President a veto over the transfer. Until last week, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have refrained. That has now changed.
What has largely been lost on the Enemedia, as well as the denizens of Davos, is that the Chagos deal is one of the main reasons for Trump’s demands in Greenland.
