The case for decolonizing the Chagos islands: A response to Bashfield

The US military base on the British-controlled island of Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago is a lynchpin of the USA’s Indo-Pacific Strategy. As the Pentagon’s only base in the Indian Ocean proper, Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia (NSFDG) constitutes a unique launchpad for US military operations from the Arabian Gulf to the South China Sea. But NSFDG comes with strings attached: it is housed inside a territorial jurisdiction, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), that London makes available to the United States free of charge but which most of the international community regards as an illegal colony (Nichols, 2019). Indeed, an overwhelming majority of the world’s states have called on Britain to decolonize the Chagos Archipelago (including Diego Garcia) and restore the entire territory to Mauritius, from which London unlawfully detached the islands in 1965. This poses the United States with a problem. Should Washington continue to back British control over Diego Garcia and the rest of BIOT, as it has done since the 1960s? Or would US interests be best served by urging London to initiate a transfer of sovereign authority to Mauritius, as is the will of the international community? In a recent article published in Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, Bashfield (2020a) sought to illuminate the USA’s strategic (military) interests in Diego Garcia and thereby explain the US calculus when it comes to the ongoing sovereignty dispute. If the problem is treated as one of how to secure maximum flexibility for the US forces that rely upon NSFDG for their operations, Bashfield suggests, then it must be concluded that London remains a far more desirable landlord than Port Louis, so much so that the British and Americans can be expected to pay ‘considerable [reputational] costs’ in defense of the status quo (pp. 177-178). This is an important conclusion, not least of all because it likely reflects the dominant view in Washington, DC – namely, that Diego Garcia is valuable to the United States only insofar as it facilitates military actions across the Indian Ocean littoral and beyond, and so Washington should be expected to prefer whichever landlord can commit to imposing the fewest restrictions upon military activities on the island. In this response, however, I argue that Bashfield is too charitable when it comes to evaluating US policy towards the Chagos Archipelago. For even if he does not excuse or endorse US support for British sovereignty over Diego Garcia (his article does not take