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Britain will go back to the drawing board on its agreement to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said on Wednesday. The move comes a day after US President Donald Trump attacked the deal during his first meeting with Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
The two leaders met on Tuesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. With Burnham sitting beside him, Trump said he expected the British leader to reconsider the “terrible deal”. Burnham nodded and replied “yep”.
Burnham, who succeeded Keir Starmer in July, later told broadcasters that Britain would “work hard” to resolve the issue and that he was “confident we can find it working with our US partners”.
Speaking to the BBC, Streeting said Trump’s objections were “not news to us”. But he said the president’s latest remarks “provide absolute clarity that his position on this Chagos deal as currently drafted is not changing”.
“So we have to do more work with our American allies, with President Trump and his administration, to get the deal to a place where we can support it,” he said.
Streeting also confirmed that Britain would not “at this stage” make the annual payments of at least £120 million (€139 million) it had agreed to pay Mauritius to lease back the military base on Diego Garcia.
Months of US opposition
The agreement, reached last year between Starmer and the Mauritian government, would hand the Indian Ocean archipelago back to Britain’s former colony. Britain would then lease the strategic US-UK base on Diego Garcia for 99 years, with the option to extend. Britain announced in April that the plans were on hold.
Trump first backed the pact but later turned against it, calling it “an act of great stupidity”, and it has caused friction with his administration for months.
Starmer defended the agreement by arguing that international legal rulings had cast doubt on Britain’s claim to the islands, and that only a deal with Mauritius could secure continued US and UK use of the base.
Britain held on to the Chagos Islands when Mauritius became independent in the 1960s. It removed thousands of islanders, who have since brought a series of compensation claims in British courts. In 2019, the International Court of Justice concluded that Britain unlawfully separated Chagos from Mauritius when ending colonial rule..
‘Ostrich strategy’
James Cartlidge, defence spokesman for the opposition Conservatives, said the agreement “should be binned entirely”.
Streeting rejected that approach. He told Times Radio: “The ostrich strategy of sticking our heads in the sand and hoping it (will) go away … is not a wise strategy when it concerns one of the most sensitive national security assets we have anywhere in the world.”
Jack Pannell, a senior researcher at the British Foreign Policy Group think-tank, told AFP that Burnham’s focus with Trump would be on “the big international issues”, such as AI regulation, Ukraine and the Middle East.
“Success for Burnham means avoiding this issue becoming a millstone around his neck while he pursues his other foreign policy priorities and focuses on his domestic agenda,” Pannell said. “The chances of a breakthrough on this issue are slim, and that may suit the prime minister just fine.”
Also on Tuesday, Trump signed a security agreement with the leaders of Greenland and Denmark that will allow the US to build two military bases in southern and eastern Greenland.
Additional sources • AFP