US President Donald Trump, sitting alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the Oval Office on Thursday, signalled he supported the UK’s plan to transfer control of a group of small but strategically vital Indian Ocean islands to Mauritius.
“I have a feeling it’s going to work out very well,” Trump said, adding that “we’ll be inclined to go along with your country”.
Just minutes before his bilateral meeting with Starmer, the US president told reporters the issue would be on the agenda.
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“I think it’s a little bit early. We have to be given the details, but it doesn’t sound bad,” he said.
Trump’s support defies the wishes of several fellow Republican Party members as well as his allies in Britain who worry about China’s potential influence on the archipelago, home to a key US-UK military facility, mindful of Beijing’s close ties with Mauritius.
At the heart of the dispute: the Chagos Islands, once part of Mauritius and controlled by Britain after Mauritius gained independence in 1968.
Thereafter Britain leased the archipelago to the US for use as a military base, forcibly removing up to 2,000 residents to make way for the facility. Construction of the facility began in 1971 and was completed in 1986.
The jointly operated base on the island of Diego Garcia – equidistant from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia – has played a pivotal role in American military operations, particularly during armed conflicts in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan.
The covert base is still used by US bombers with nuclear capabilities as well as by nuclear-powered submarines. Its importance has only risen over time, amounting to a critical asset in countering China’s expanding sway in the Indo-Pacific region.
After years of sovereignty disputes, Britain last October agreed to transfer control of the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius.
The deal was endorsed by then US president Joe Biden as a “clear demonstration that countries can overcome long-standing historical challenges to reach peaceful and mutually beneficial outcomes”.
The agreement included provisions for the return of Diego Garcia’s displaced former residents and their descendants, although the island itself would remain under British control.
Reports from British media suggested London would pay Mauritius nearly US$110 million annually for a 99-year lease with an option of a 40-year extension. The British government has not disclosed the precise figure.
Trump on Thursday said Starmer had agreed to a “strong lease”.
“They’re talking about a very long-term, powerful lease, a very strong lease, about 140 years,” the US president added.
The deal, however, has yet to be finalised. In November, elections in Mauritius and the US held up its progress.
On Wednesday, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said in an interview that London had “a shared military and intelligence interest” with Washington “and of course they’ve got to be happy with the deal or there is no deal”.
But the new Mauritian Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam has voiced opposition to the current deal, calling for improved financial incentives.
Earlier this month, Ramgoolam described the agreement as a “sell-out”. And last week, he posted on social media that representatives from the new Trump administration would be present during future negotiations.
In Britain, the Conservative Party has rejected the agreement brokered by Starmer, who leads the rival Labour Party, arguing it would harm British interests.
Trump’s close British ally, far-right leader Nigel Farage, who attended the US president’s inauguration in January, warned earlier this month Trump could impose tariffs on Britain if it proceeded with the Chagos agreement.
While Trump did not comment on the deal until Thursday, members of his cabinet and Republican lawmakers have been vocal in criticising it.
In October, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then a Republican US senator for Florida, said in an interview that the deal would boost China’s development and posed a “grave threat” to US national interests.
Rubio believed it would “provide Communist China with the opportunity to gain valuable intelligence on our naval support facilities in Mauritius” and “threatens America’s critical military posture in the region”.
US senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, on Monday cautioned that the agreement could “damage” US-British relations.
He believed China would be “loving all of this” given Mauritius’s close ties with Beijing, which seeks unrestricted access to the region’s critical shipping lanes.
“This is insane,” Kennedy said of the deal on the US Senate floor. “This is cell-deep stupid. This is bone-deep, down-to-the-marrow stupid.”
In recent years, Mauritius has deepened its ties with China, signing in 2019 the first free-trade agreement of its kind between Beijing and an African nation. At the same time, the island nation maintains strong economic and cultural ties with India, a significant US partner in the Indo-Pacific.
More than 2.7 billion people live along the Indian Ocean’s coastlines, accounting for 12 per cent of the world’s GDP. The region provides an economic lifeline for much of the world, with three geographical choke points critical to global trade.
Meanwhile, Starmer has said international rulings have cast doubt on the military base’s legal status.
In 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled that the British government had illegally separated the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius.
Later the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution in support of Mauritius and called for the country to fully decolonise.
“Without legal certainty, the base cannot operate in practical terms as it should,” Starmer told MPs earlier this month, stressing that this uncertainty “is bad for our national security and a gift for our adversaries”.
Kennedy went further, saying the military base was “built mostly with American dollars” and the UN, which the senator asserted wanted to “shame” Britain for colonisation, did not hold any jurisdiction over either the UK or the US.
After their meeting on Thursday, Trump and Starmer did not elaborate on their discussions about Chagos.
Instead, the US president congratulated Britain for pledging to raise its defence spending to 2.5 per cent of economic output by 2027 – up from 2.3 per cent – calling the increase “quite a bit” and “a great thing”.
The additional funding could be used to fund the Chagos deal, some British media have reported.
During a press conference afterwards, Trump described the US and Britain as sharing a “unique friendship” that had “only gotten stronger”.
He said the two sides would work on a trade agreement as well as a “very achievable peace” in Ukraine, which has been at war with Russia since the Kremlin invaded in 2022.
Starmer’s visit to Washington follows that of French President Emmanuel Macron, who sought earlier this week to convince the American leader not to rush a ceasefire deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin at any cost.
Separately, Trump accepted an invitation from King Charles for a second state visit to Britain. He last visited in 2019 and is the first elected American official to be invited for a second state visit to the country.
More from South China Morning Post:
- Republicans urge Britain to oppose China’s plans for new embassy in London
- UK’s Starmer to meet with Trump in Washington next week
- Starmer rejects Trump ‘out of line’ comment, calls UK-US trade ‘fair and balanced’
- Mauritius PM questions US-British base lease, citing sovereignty concerns
- India’s navy launches submarine, warships to guard against China in Indian Ocean
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