LONDON — The president was fine with it a year ago. Now it’s “GREAT STUPIDITY.”
President Donald Trump told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in February that he was on board with a deal the United Kingdom had reached with the island nation of Mauritius over ownership of the Chagos Archipelago, a remote string of atolls in the Indian Ocean, including Diego Garcia — home to a base for U.S. bomber aircraft.
“I have a feeling it is going to work out very well,” Trump said to cameras in an amicable Oval Office meeting with Starmer. Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the “historic” agreement.
On Tuesday, however, Trump seized on the deal to justify his effort to seize Greenland, describing the U.K. agreement as a disqualifying example of international idiocy.
Trump’s quest for Greenland, the vast Arctic territory long controlled by Denmark, a NATO ally, has become a bitter, high-stakes transatlantic contretemps, surging from fringe strategic fancy to a Category 5 geopolitical hurricane.
With Trump displaying aggressive territorial ambitions, he highlighted the Chagos Islands agreement — which grants the nation of Mauritius sovereignty over the contested archipelago but guarantees Britain and the United States a 99-year lock on a joint air base there — as a contemptible example of “total weakness.”
“Shockingly, our ‘brilliant’ NATO ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia, the site of a vital U.S. Military Base, to Mauritius,” Trump posted on Truth Social Tuesday. “The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY, and is another in a very long line of National Security reasons why Greenland has to be acquired.”
Trump’s sharp reversal and astonishing rebuke of the U.K., which is often described as America’s closest ally, managed to stupefy British officials who are mostly numbed to serial shocks from this White House.
Trump’s expansionist moves — from taking “control” of Venezuela to risking the transatlantic alliance in his grab for Greenland — contrast sharply with Britain’s recent history of unwinding imperial legacies from Hong Kong to Africa.
“The contrast could not be more stark between the United Kingdom negotiating a deal to implement international law and President Trump being unable to understand why any country would comply with the law at the global level when it goes against its immediate interest,” said Marc Weller, a law professor at Cambridge University and head of international law at Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank.
“The United Kingdom has done its very best to absorb the many upsets in the relationship between London and Washington,” Weller said. “Now we have arrived at a breaking point. With the Greenland episode, the British government is slowly realizing that it needs to stand up for principles.”
The whiplash criticism, delivered as Trump prepared to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was all the more shocking given London’s assiduous work to preserve the “special relationship” through the tumultuous first year of Trump’s second presidency. This included inviting Trump for a historic second state visit with royal trappings.
“You can certainly say that no one saw this one coming,” said a person familiar with the deliberations in the Starmer government. “Keir spent a lot of time getting buy-in from the Trump team [on the Chagos Islands agreement] and felt it was fairly settled.”
The timing is particularly awkward for Starmer, the Labour Party prime minister, who has made cultivating Trump a centerpiece of his foreign policy despite their ideological differences.
Starmer traveled to meet the president at Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in Scotland in July, enduring criticism for not forcefully condemning what critics called Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. Since then, Starmer has carefully calibrated his language on contentious issues including tariffs and Venezuela.
The prime minister has been more forceful on Greenland. Starmer’s office also pushed back Tuesday on Trump’s Chagos Islands blast, but cautiously and emphasizing Trump’s U-turn on the issue. Officials pointed out that Britain said publicly it would execute the agreement only with U.S. approval.
“Our position hasn’t changed on Diego Garcia or on the treaty that’s been signed,” a spokesman told the BBC. “The U.S. supports the deal, and the president explicitly recognized its strength last year.”
Privately, British and European diplomats said they hoped this was another example of Trump’s ferocious rhetoric being more spleen venting or negotiation framing than a lasting policy shift. Starmer had no plans to travel to Davos, where heads of state will be lining up to meet Trump, but the two will talk soon, the person familiar with government deliberations said.
“They talk often,” this person said. “That has been invaluable in the last year.”
Trump’s criticism, however, could mark a widening gap between a president eager to change the map in his favor and a weakening onetime colonizer now doubling down on international law.
London’s return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 was in fulfillment of treaty terms between the two countries. Government lawyers advised the past two U.K. governments that they were at risk of losing access to the Chagos Islands entirely by defying a growing international consensus against British control.
The Chagos Islands dispute dates to the final years of Britain’s empire. In 1965, as its colony of Mauritius moved toward independence, the U.K. carved off the Chagos to form the British Indian Ocean Territory, a move later judged unlawful.
Britain forcibly removed more than 1,000 residents to clear the way for a joint U.K.-U.S. military base on the southernmost island, Diego Garcia, which became a key U.S. strategic hub during the Cold War and after.
Mauritius challenged British control for decades. In 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled that the U.K.’s continued administration was illegal, and the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly backed Mauritius’s claim. The two countries reached an agreement in 2024 to transfer sovereignty to Mauritius while guaranteeing long-term U.K.-U.S. access to Diego Garcia under a lease extending into the next century.
Britain agreed to pay an average of a billion pounds a year for the lease (about $1.35 billion).
The negotiations were launched under then-Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who later served briefly as a Conservative prime minister. But her Tory party, along with hard-liners in Washington, have criticized the deal for possibly giving a foothold in the region to China, a key trading partner of Mauritius.
Many analysts say those fears are overblown, given the remoteness of the islands and the continued presence of the British and American militaries.
“I think it was the most strategically clever agreement Britain could have made,” said Darshana Baruah, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore. “It secures complete operational jurisdiction and continued operations in the same way things have been working for the next 99 years.”
Trump’s sudden fixation on big countries dominating weaker places, such as Greenland, where they have military facilities is a departure from international norms, Baruah said.
“There are many, many countries that have bases in other nations with just agreements in place,” she said. “This argument that you must have sovereignty to protect it is new.”
The immediate future of the Chagos deal remains uncertain. Starmer slowed final negotiations in January 2025 to await the Trump administration’s review, and the agreement still requires final parliamentary ratification. Supporters fear that Trump’s public opposition could provide cover for the British government to abandon the deal.
Doing so would probably expose Britain to international condemnation, undermine its claims to respect international law, and potentially intensify competing claims over other British territories, including with Argentina over the Falkland Islands and with Spain over Gibraltar. Buenos Aires has already cited Britain’s willingness to negotiate over Chagos as precedent for talks on the Falklands.
The Chagos episode also puts pressure on Britain to choose between alignment with the U.S. and closer integration with Europe — a choice Starmer has sought to avoid.
The prime minister has pursued a post-Brexit “reset” with the European Union while maintaining that the U.S. relationship remains paramount. But as Trump’s territorial ambitions grow and his attacks on European allies multiply, that balancing act is growing more precarious.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), visiting London, sought to provide reassurance, telling GB News that the U.S.-U.K. special relationship is “critically important, not just for our countries, but, of course, for the entire world.”
But Johnson, along with the Congress he helps lead, may wield no influence over Trump’s territorial appetites.
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