Chagos, Iran and the new era of naked imperialism
On 18 February 2026, the day before his first ‘Board of Peace’ meeting in Washington, Trump announced – by Truth Social Post – that he no longer supports the Chagos Island deal made between Mauritius and Britain. By providing yet more evidence that the Anglo-American imperialists are deal incapable, the issue of the cyclopean US military base, located in British territory, at the centre of the Indian Ocean cuts to the heart of imperial history, inter-imperial power relations, and the degree to which they are unravelling.
What are the Chagos islands – and why do they matter?
The Dutch colonised Mauritius and turned it into a sugar cane plantation in the 17th century (naming it after their prince, Maurice of Orange). The French later took possession of the colony, and later Britain took control of Mauritius and the Chagos Islands during the Napoleonic wars. In 1814 they were formally ceded by France to the UK under the terms of the treaty of Paris – i.e., with the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. The dependencies ceded included the Chagos Islands, which were mostly populated by the descendants of enslaved people who had been brought there from East Africa to work on coconut plantations.
Needless to say, the inhabitants of the islands were not consulted. They were simply regarded by the European colonists as the slave-labour of the plantations, part of the prize that was to be ceded, as were serfs in feudal estates – the booty of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo.
For a century and a half of British rule, between 1814 and 1965, the Chagos islands were administered as a dependency of the British colony of Mauritius, which for many years was their largest sugar plantation. Direct slave labour was gradually transformed into indentured labour, after the formal abolition of capitalist slavery in 1834. That indentured population was largely brought by the British en-masse from their Indian colonies – particularly during periods of great famine induced by their rack-renting colonial regime.
In 1965, at the gateway of Mauritian independence (Mauritius became a ‘Commonwealth nation’ with a degree of independence in 1968, becoming a republic as recently as 1992), the UK formally detached the Chagos archipelago and its strategically significant expanse of Indian Ocean from Mauritius to create the ‘British Indian Ocean Territory’ (BIOT).
The territories of the Chagos islands were thus separated from Mauritius and retained by Britain, and Diego Garcia was leased by Britain in 1966 to the USA – for a military base.
“Britain wanted to keep the islands because it planned with the United States to establish a military facility on Diego Garcia as part of the US Navy’s ‘strategic island concept’ for acquiring new bases in strategically important places” (Denis Staunton, ‘Will Donald Trump use the Chagos Islands to bomb Iran?’, Irish Times, 19 February 2026).
Diego Garcia is the largest Chagos island, whose waters and lands make a natural and strategic harbour in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The term ‘agreement’ or ‘lease’ implies a deal made by interested parties of equal standing, rights and power, with the ability to make voluntary arrangements by mutual consent. The inhabitants of Mauritius or Chagos, regarded as colonial slaves by both the Americans and British, were not of course consulted – and therefore made no ‘agreement’.
The initial lease term (from Britain to the US) was for 50 years, with an option to extend for a further 20 years. In reality it was expected that the islands would be retained ‘for defence needs of the Anglo-American imperialists indefinitely.
The ‘agreement’ led to the forced removal of the Chagossian population between 1967 and 1973.
“…the British government suggested ‘removal of population altogether to some locale outside territory, or onto other islands in Chagos group’. The US wanted all the islands cleared and Britain got rid of the population over the next few years, encouraging them to move by, among other things, gassing their dogs.
“Most exiled Chagossians moved to Mauritius or the Seychelles where many lived in extreme poverty and experienced discrimination and other forms of hardship. After Britain granted them citizenship in 2002, some took up the offer, many of them settling in Crawley near Gatwick Airport” (Denis Staunton, ‘Starmer’s Indian Ocean headache’, Irish Times subscriber newsletter, 19 February 2026).
Labour and Tory – partners in crime
To underscore the complete symbiosis between Labour and Tory in the administration of the affairs of British monopoly capitalism – an article by Ben Judah in The Times is revealing. Ben Judah was special adviser to David Lammy between 2024-2026 as both foreign secretary and deputy prime minister. He’s an arch-Zionist and ‘Labour’ imperialist, who was also close to the campaign to oust Corbyn from the party:
“The idea that there is a genuine, real, breathing British Indian Ocean Territory, an overseas member of the British family like Bermuda or the Falklands [!], is in fact a fiction.
“There is a base on Diego Garcia and it is an American base, just with a tiny British contingent and a British flag. ‘BIOT’ only exists because the Americans wanted a piece of what was British colonial territory and asked us to carve it off in 1965 and remove the Chagossians, from what was going to be Mauritius, to build a base there.
“However, this base is not just any old base. Once you’ve been briefed, even partially, on what it does the information gives you vertigo. Both now, and in government, communicating the details to the public would be violating the Official Secrets Acts.
“It is frustrating. But I ask you to believe me that once you understand what it does, and how our diminutive presence lets the UK get access to something we would never be able to build or afford ourselves, you enter the British deep state’s logic: we simply must do whatever we have to do to retain access” [You may, Ben. We would not.]
He continues: “…The Democrats were looking at the map of the Indian Ocean — and with Britain’s legal position collapsing internationally — they feared a situation where America’s crucial superbase would soon be deemed illegally occupied Mauritian territory by most of the rest of the world….
“…What the British deep state did next was exactly what it has done in these situations before. In the best traditions of perfidious Albion, it would negotiate a deal, where everything would change for everything to remain the same. Mauritius would be able to call itself sovereign over the islands, enjoying the pleasure of it being shaded theirs on a map — but in any way that remotely mattered in military terms, an exclusion and veto zone where Anglo-American authority was complete would endure.
“This is classic Cold War tradecraft. And to boot, for market rate rental of the base — 0.2 per cent of Britain’s annual defence budget — a considerable chunk of Mauritius finances would now be dependent on the UK, thereby locking them into the global West in the great China game. Jonathan Powell’s deal as special envoy went through the most rigorous and stress-tested US inter-agency process imaginable. They were more than satisfied. With President Trump’s initial approval Whitehall felt it had figured a way to guarantee British access to the superpowers of Diego Garcia for the rest of the 21st century…” (‘I worked on Chagos, a deal worthy of Le Carré. Then Trump charged in’, 22 February 2026).
Trump’s aggressive re-negotiation, like his tariff threats and much of his mafia-like ‘statesmanship’ leaves the ‘Labour’ think-tank advisor Judah in despair. Not for the trampling of rights of the working and colonial peoples. Oh no. For the weakening position of British imperialism in the Anglo-American ‘special relationship:
“Our Chagos problem is a subset of our much deeper America problem. We are deeply dependent on a superpower that is not the Cold War superpower it once was with its bipartisan foreign policy consensus — but one that has become erratic, internally divided and impulsive. Pushed towards a deal by one administration, played around by another, painfully forced to suck it up because we’re critically dependent on them: this is what an abusive special relationship looks like.
“The United States is threatening to attack Iran… and wants to use the base as part of that offensive. But Britain’s commitment to international law [!] — there is no credible way to argue [!] such an attack is legal — means it cannot allow that. This, I understand, is why Trump has decided to pull support for the whole Chagos deal. We are tied in contradictions” (ibid.). An interesting admission.
A crime under international law – but not the ‘rules-based order’!
The dismemberment of colonies prior to granting them independence, served the interests of the colonising power, frustrating the sovereignty of the people striving for independence and facilitating the ongoing control and interference of the colonial power in their ‘post-colonial’ affairs. It has been a staple of the transition from direct colonialism into the financial and political control exercised over ‘developing nations’ by the imperialist powers.
It is a familiar tactic used by British and US imperialism. In Ireland. In India. In Vietnam and Korea. In China. With the division of Panama from Colombia. In the retention of Guantanamo base, in eastern Cuba. And in this case in the division of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius.
As such the division of Mauritius and severance of the Chagos islands violated United Nations resolutions banning the dismemberment of colonial territories before independence. United Nations resolutions, anchored in the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples – GA Resolution 1514 (XV) – strictly forbid the dismantling of colonial territories prior to independence:
6. “Any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations“.
The language of the resolution, recognising as it does the right of nations to independence and to dispose of their own resources, in reality runs counter to the entire history of imperialism. Such a state of independence and freedom is realisable only by a broadly mobilised working class and peasantry as a powerful national anti-colonial movement, ready to confront and defeat imperialism.
The language of the resolution reflects the era of successful and growing anti-colonial struggles, that was brought in by the victories of the great Socialist October Revolution in Russia and the Communist Revolution in China. The collapse of the USSR, the collapse of the Eastern European and central Asian Soviet Republics and Peoples’ Democracies, the unbridled period of Anglo-American hegemony have all undermined the real basis upon which the UN might have once seemed to reflect the will and interests of the mass of the world’s peoples.
ICJ ordered return of Chagos to Mauritius
Given the absence of any progress with making its protests heard by successive Labour and Tory governments in the UK, Mauritius took up the matter in the available international political and legal avenues at the UN.
On 22 June 2017, by a margin of 94 to 15 countries, the UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to give an advisory opinion on the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius before the country’s independence.
In September 2018, the ICJ began hearings on the case. 17 countries argued in favour of Mauritius. The UK and US argued that “this matter should not be decided by the court but should be resolved through bilateral negotiations” – of course, as there was no imperative to progress such negotiations toward any resolution!
The odious former Tory MP Alan Duncan stated in his capacity as Minister of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, that “We are disappointed that this bilateral dispute is being taken to the International Court of Justice. This is an inappropriate use of the ICJ advisory mechanism because it is an attempt to circumvent the principle that no State should be compelled to have its bilateral disputes submitted for judicial settlement without its consent, not least on matters of sovereignty [!]. This is a matter for the UK and Mauritius to resolve bilaterally” (June 2017).
Unimpressed with these pleas, the judges of the International Court of Justice ruled on 25 February 2019, by thirteen votes to one, that the United Kingdom is under an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible. Only the American judge, Joan Donoghue, voted in favour of the UK.
The president of the court, Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf, said the detachment of the Chagos Archipelago in 1965 from Mauritius had not been based on a “free and genuine expression of the people concerned.”
“This continued administration constitutes a wrongful act,” he said, adding “The UK has an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible and that all member states must co-operate with the United Nations to complete the decolonisation of Mauritius.“
The enforcement of ICJ decisions – as we have seen in Palestine – in the absence of strong military compulsion, occurs only when the decisions coincide with the interests of the imperialists. The attitude of the NATO powers is always ‘who is going to make me?’ The only language they understand is force.
USA’s ongoing interest in Diego Garcia
The US military and naval base at Diego Garcia has been used extensively in their colonial wars, and they intend to continue to use it to threaten Iran, Yemen, the Middle East, southern and eastern Africa, particularly the Horn of Africa, and south Asia.
The US army consider the base so important they nickname it the ‘Footprint of Freedom’. The ‘Boot of Oppression’ would be more accurate. “Diego Garcia, a footprint-shaped coral atoll, is one of the most strategically important military assets to the UK and US and is considered a cornerstone of the ‘special relationship’ between the countries.” (Oliver Wright, George Grylls and Charlie Parker, ‘Why is the island of Diego Garcia important?’, The Times, 19 February 2026).
The base provides the US with an apparently ‘untouchable’, remote location for operation of long-range bombers (including B-2 ‘stealth’ bombers), refuelling and fitting naval ships and aircraft carriers, and is part of its surveillance, Global Positioning System (GPS) and other aerospace and satellite networks. It also hosts US nuclear missiles and submarines.
“The airfield hosts heavy long-range bombers, such as America’s B-2 Spirit and B-52 Stratofortress, as well as C-17 Globemaster transporters and P-8 Poseidon spy planes. From the tarmac they can carry out missions in the Middle East, east Africa and south Asia.
“The island’s deep-water port also serves as a maritime hub for naval assets ranging from nuclear-powered attack submarines to destroyers, cruisers and aircraft carriers. Once refuelled and resupplied, the vessels can deploy across the Indo-Pacific.
“Lesser known is the fact that the base is also home to surveillance stations used to disrupt terrorist [clearly the Anglo-American imperial forces are the true terrorists, as the genocide in Palestine, Ukraine War, and the entire spat over the illegal strikes on Iran demonstrate only too clearly!] attacks, protect satellites and provide global intelligence capabilities.
“Diego Garcia is one of just four locations in the world that operates ground station antennae for the global positioning system (GPS), which everyone from motorists to astronauts rely on for navigation [fortunately not the Russian, Chinese and Iranian military, however!].
“It is also where specialist monitoring equipment is stationed to continuously keep tabs on countries that are testing nuclear weapons” (ibid.).
In the age of hypersonic missiles, Diego Garcia may no longer be ‘untouchable’, but it remains of vital operational significance to the USA.
The base houses about 2,500 personnel, including US Navy support staff, contractors, and a small UK contingent. It features a deepwater port, an airfield, and extensive logistics facilities. Nuclear weapons are probably periodically sited on the archipelago – weapons trained on Russia, China, Korea and Iran, among other states.
Diego Garcia has therefore been a key base for a long succession of US criminal imperial wars, all supported by Britain. These include operations from the so-called Cold War, e.g., operations in Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya and throughout Africa, to counter the liberation forces and support apartheid states and colonial regimes. It was used extensively during the genocidal imperialist wars waged on Iraq and Afghanistan, and more recently, has been used to strike the Ansar Allah government (so called Houthi rebels) in Yemen. And it is part of the network of bases and offensive facilities aimed at Russia and China.
Return of sovereignty to Mauritius?
Coinciding with the advent of Keir Starmer’s ‘Labour’ government, in July 2024, Mauritius accepted a deal to have its ‘sovereignty’ returned… but in reality, Britain would continue to hold Diego Garcia and simply pay £3.4 billion (split into annual payments, made over 99 years!) for the island’s lease. The USA – as the chief aggressive tenant – would continue to occupy the premises, armed to the teeth with its warships, F16 fighter jets, B2-stealth bombers, nuclear subs, listening stations and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
US president Donald Trump said in 2024 that he accepted that the deal was the “best” Starmer could make – having already added the caveat that if it ever fell apart, then they retained the “right to militarily secure and reinforce the American presence in Diego Garcia”. The last part of this statement is the true part: we’re never giving it back!
Trump reneges
In the wake of his recent strikes on Iran, genocide in Palestine, kidnapping of Venezuela’s serving President, Nicolas Maduro, ongoing support for war on Russia in Ukraine, and of course his threats to grab Greenland, and coming hot on the heels of Marco Rubio’s speech at the 2026 Munich security conference (see below), Trump has reversed his position.
It seems that the immediate precipitating cause was a fit of pique that the UK government felt sufficiently constrained by the blatant illegality of Trump’s planned war on Iran that it did not want to condone the US use of the ‘British Indian Ocean Territory’ base for the purpose – at least not openly.
History suggests that if the Pentagon decides to use Diego Garcia, Britain’s scruples about international law will not be allowed to stand in the way. In a memo to McNamara on 25 July 1967, the joint chiefs of staff stressed how important it was to have a naval facility on the island.
“Though it would be desirable to obtain UK participation, the US requirement for Diego Garcia is such that the project should be undertaken unilaterally, if necessary,” it said (quoted by Denis Staunton, op.cit.).
Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference
US Secretary of Defence Mark Rubio’s message, delivered to the European ruling political class on Valentine’s Day 2026 at the Munich Security Conference, bears repetition. Rubio is not only a staunch Republican neo-con war-hawk, but also a descendant of exiled Cuban counter-revolutionaries – a Miami ‘gusano’ (worm), as Castro dubbed the rabidly reactionary exiles – whom Trump and the US is aching to re-instal, as he made clear in a televised interview from his presidential plane at the end of February. The USA has been itching to have Cuba back since losing it to the M26-7 revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in 1959. The CIA in particular has been smarting since the devastating failure and humiliation of Allen Dulles’ attempted war to re-colonise Cuba at the ‘Bay of Pigs’ in April 1961.
Rubio’s whole speech is worth reading and considering, but the following passage jumps out:
“We cannot continue to allow those who blatantly and openly threaten our citizens and endanger our global stability to shield themselves behind abstractions of international law [!] which they themselves routinely violate [!].
“This is the path that President Trump and the United States has embarked upon. [indeed!] It is the path we ask you here in Europe to join us on. [hear!] It is a path we have walked together before and hope to walk together again. For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe. [a veritable panegyric to colonial slavery!]
“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain [Joseph Goebbels’ expression recycled by Churchill, mark you!] and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires [!] had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions [praise be!] and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.
“Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s [Anglo-American and European imperialism’s] age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make.
“This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.
“And this is why we do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame [!]. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.
“And this is why we do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it, for we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”
A frank admission – if such were needed – that US, British and European imperialism intend to ignore all ‘international law’ in favour of reclaiming their ‘birth right and culture’ of unbridled imperialism, of the imposition of economic and cultural slavery upon the masses of the world – ‘The white man’s burden’, as Kipling termed it.
Joseph Stalin famously observed at the 7th enlarged plenum of Executive Committee of the Communist International, on 7 December 1926:
“What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.”
That is precisely where we find ourselves.
And so: Chagos!
So as the US imperialists manoeuvre to destroy Iran in its ongoing and genocidal bid to subordinate the Middle East (we trust they will fail in this endeavour), Trump returns to their ‘essential’ military asset on Diego Garcia, claiming that recognising the sovereignty of other nations is ‘wokeism’ – and wants the deal thrown out. Diego Garcia is about 5,200km from Tehran and could serve as a launching point for any attack given its proximity to Iran and its long runways.
Tory shadow Foreign Secretary Dame Priti Patel said Trump had “once again publicly rebuked Keir Starmer and his government over their ill-judged, unnecessary and expensive Chagos surrender”. Former Tory Home Secretary turned Reform shadow cabinet member Suella Braverman also took the opportunity to don her MAGA cap and echo Trump’s words – while beating her favourite war drum against ‘the threat of China’. The reality is that the deal ‘worked out’ by the British state has impeccably imperialist (and bipartisan) credentials. Both of these revolting imperialist house-slaves have their fingerprints on the deal.
The NATO imperialists are petrified, however, that China might develop a base on another part of the archipelago were sovereignty to pass out of British hands, despite the ongoing lease of Diego Garcia.
Freedom comes to those who take it
The workers’ great hope for the present is precisely the rise of Russia and China – both of whom have pledged to support Iran and Cuba, economically and militarily. We fully realise that neither Russia nor China have a string of military bases worldwide from which to directly counter the warmongering US empire. Despite their hypersonic, Oreshnik, Burovestnik, Poseidon and other missile, drone, naval and military advances that give them in many respects a strategic advantage over the USA, to engage them is to bring Russia and China (and the world) to the brink of global thermonuclear war.
They need, above all, strong local partners whose sovereignty they can back as strong allies. This is – as well as their models of independence, sovereignty and freedom that point the way to the workers of all countries – the significance of the strength of the Cuban, Venezuelan and Iranian peoples and revolutions. They are at the cutting edge of the anti-imperialist struggle.
Our entire raft of imperialist politicians need incarceration – and worse – for their crimes. The only question for us in Britain, is how long the British working class will continue to content themselves with the petty bribes of their ruling class, the weak ‘leadership’ of the Labour-affiliated and controlled union bureaucrats and ‘left’ parties arrayed around the imperialist ‘Labour’ Party. How long will they accept the openly reactionary political adjuncts of imperialism (Tory, Liberal, Green, Reform, etc.) and continue to acquiesce in their own enslavement. We will work tirelessly to make the British working class a sovereign power capable of fulfilling our responsibility to ourselves and our brother workers of all nations.