How the UK Is Undermining US Indo-Pacific Security

Excerpt

While the world’s attention is on Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere, the British government is careening this week toward a colossal strategic blunder with significant implications for American interests in the Indo-Pacific. The British parliament is in the process of passing the “Agreement concerning the Chagos Archipelago including Diego Garcia,” which would transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean from the UK to Mauritius. This archipelago contains Diego Garcia, one of the US military’s most critical facilities. 

The Diego Garcia base, known colloquially as the “footprint of freedom,” is one of the few outside the United States that can reload nuclear submarines, port aircraft carriers, and base and launch strategic bombers, and is critical for Space Force operations.  

Diego Garcia supports operations in some of the most strategically and economically important parts of the world—from the Middle East to Central Asia to the Pacific Ocean—all while being protected by the vast “moat” of the Indian Ocean. It is key to US power projection in the Indo-Pacific and to deterrence of China’s growing naval threat.

Currently, the land under the base is British territory. However, if legislation supported by British prime minister Keir Starmer is adopted, it will soon be handed over to Mauritius. When the treaty was announced in 2024, then-Senator Marco Rubio said the deal “poses a serious threat to our national security interests in the Indian Ocean and threatens critical US military posture in the region.” He was correct then, and that assessment is even truer today.

Cleo Paskal is a nonresident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,  focusing on the Indo-Pacific region, in particular, the Pacific Islands and India. Alexander Gray is a nonresident senior fellow at The Atlantic Council. He served as the chief of staff of the White House National Security Council from 2019 to 2021.