Trump 2.0 sinks Chagos Islands deal
Plans to hand over the archipelago to Mauritius are likely to fall foul of the incoming president’s drive to compete with China.
The deal signed by the government to hand over the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius is unravelling after allies of president-elect Donald J. Trump and the newly elected Mauritian Prime Minister publicly denounced it.
An agreement to hand over the British Indian Ocean Territory, also known as the Chagos Islands, to Mauritius was announced by the British Prime Minister and his former Mauritian counterpart on 3 October. At the time, the British and Mauritian governments declared that they had “reached an historic political agreement on the exercise of sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago.”
Under the terms of the deal, the British government agreed to relinquish its legal sovereignty over the islands and pledged to make annual payments to the Mauritian government. In return, the Mauritian government agreed to allow the United Kingdom to exercise sovereign rights over the Chagos islands for a period of 99 years. This would, in turn, permit the UK and the United States to continue operating a joint military base on the atoll of Diego Garcia.
These plans have now been dealt a hammer blow by the outcome of elections in both the United States and Mauritius. The US presidential election held on 5 November, and Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House in January 2025, means that Washington’s public support for the arrangement cannot be guaranteed for long.
The incoming Trump administration is gearing up to compete with China and is reported to be hostile to an agreement which, its critics say, could cede influence to China and harm American security interests. They fear that Mauritius, which has recently signed a free trade agreement with Beijing, could come under pressure to agree to a Chinese presence on the archipelago.
One Trump ally, James Risch, a Senator for Idaho and a key member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said that the Chagos Islands deal “gives in to Chinese lawfare and yields to pressure from unaccountable international institutions like the International Court of Justice at the expense of US and UK strategic and military interests.”
Senator Marco Rubio of Flordia, the China hawk who Trump has nominated to be his Secretary of State, described the UK’s agreement with Mauritius as “concerning as it would provide an opportunity for communist China to gain valuable intelligence on our naval support facility in Mauritius.” He added: “This poses a serious threat to our national security interests in the Indian Ocean and threatens critical US military posture in the region.”
The impending withdrawal of Washington’s support has been compounded by the victory in parliamentary elections held on 10 November of a Mauritian political alliance seeking to revisit the October agreement and drive a harder bargain. The new Mauritian premier, Navinchandra Ramgoolam, is under pressure from hardliners in his political coalition, the Alliance du Changement, to push for a better deal. During the election campaign, allies of Ramgoolam accused the previous Mauritian government of committing “high treason” over its deal with the UK. They believe that the 99-year lease of the islands is a sellout of Mauritius’s sovereign rights.
None of this has stopped Jonathan Powell, the architect of the deal, from attempting to salvage the agreement through last ditch discussions in Mauritius and Washington. Sir Keir Starmer recently made Powell UK National Security Adviser, after the deal was done.
Powell met with the new Mauritian Prime Minister on Tuesday. After the meeting, Ramgoolam expressed his doubts about the agreement and called for more time to study the details with his legal advisers. Powell is currently in Washington DC, where he is believed to be sounding out the outgoing Biden administration on the possibility of getting a deal in place before Trump’s inauguration on 20 January.
However, with support neither from the incoming administration in Washington nor Mauritius, the deal is now likely to be dead in the water.
There are many ironies in the Chagos Islands affair. The first is that Powell, who as a diplomat in the Foreign Office worked on the negotiations with China over Hong Kong in the 1980s, has proven to be so impervious to the threat posed by opening up a potential avenue for Chinese competition in the Indian Ocean.
Another is the position of Ramgoolam, the son of Mauritius’s first Prime Minister, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, who initially agreed to sell the Chagos Islands to Britain for £3 million in 1965, three years before Mauritian independence. Ramgoolam senior once described the archipelago as “a portion of our territory of which very few people knew…which is very far from here, and which we have never visited.”
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