British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pulled the deal to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands—home to the pivotal U.K.-U.S. military base Diego Garcia—from the United Kingdom to Mauritius, after President Donald Trump fiercely opposed the measure.
While the U.K. and Mauritius signed a preliminary deal in May 2025, it still required parliamentary approval, and the United States has substantial input in the decision, as well. Britain had exiled the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands—a small series of atolls in the Indian Ocean strategically located between Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands—when detaching the islands from Mauritius before Mauritius gained independence in 1968.
“The decision by Britain’s Labour government to drop the Chagos bill from the king’s speech is a massive and humiliating defeat for Keir Starmer,” Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal after the news broke Friday.
“Keir Starmer had made the Chagos surrender deal his top foreign policy priority, and the fact that this deal is no longer going through Parliament is a huge blow to Starmer’s far-left agenda,” Gardiner added.
While the Labour Party had hailed the deal as an effort to decolonize the Indian Ocean islands, critics warned that the deal would undermine the Diego Garcia U.S. military base. The agreement would have given Britain a 99-year lease for Diego Garcia. Critics also characterize Mauritius as a close Chinese ally, so surrendering the islands could strengthen China’s influence in the region.
The U.S. used Diego Garcia to launch some of the attacks in Operation Epic Fury.
“As the president has repeatedly stated, Diego Garcia’s strategic location makes it of great importance to the national security of the United States,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “He will never allow the U.S. presence at Diego Garcia to be undermined or threatened for any reason. Recent developments have proven him right once again.”
“Diego Garcia, a strategically placed island base, has enabled U.S. power throughout the Indian Ocean region, directly supporting and engaging in strike missions today in Iran, and during the Global War on Terror in Afghanistan,” Brent Sadler, a 26-year Navy veteran and senior research fellow at Heritage, told The Daily Signal.
“Loss of this base or compromising its operational viability through Chinese (or other powers’) encroachment on it would be a severe blow to U.S. and Western influence and power projection in the region not easily replaced.”
Gardiner credited President Trump’s opposition for the bill’s defeat, saying Trump was the “key reason” behind it.
“The United States has stopped the Chagos surrender deal from moving forward and this is great news for the American people, and also, frankly, for the British people, as well,” he said.
“The Heritage Foundation has led the fight against the Chagos deal in Washington for the last 18 months,” Gardiner added, calling the deal “one of the most dangerous threats to U.S. national security in many decades.”
“As long as President Trump is in office, there’s zero chance of the Chagos deal moving forward,” he concluded.
Liu Pengyu, a representative of the Chinese Embassy in the U.S., disputed concerns that China might have supported the Chagos Islands deal in order to weaken the U.S.
“China adheres to the fundamental principles of international relations, including mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs,” Liu told The Daily Signal.
“China firmly supports the United Nations decolonization process and fully understands and supports Mauritius’s legitimate and reasonable claims on decolonization.”
“China has no self-interest in this matter,” he concluded.
