6th May 2026
In decision after decision, the United Kingdom simply has to accept the changing will of the United States
As there are elections over Great Britain tomorrow, this blog goes from the local to the far-away: in particular to the Chagos Islands, otherwise known as the British Indian Ocean Territory.
The Chagos Islands are an index of actual British international influence – because things keep on being decided about them without it mattering what the United Kingdom government itself wants, even though we are the nominal controlling power.
Not long ago there was a deal which suited the United States, who has a military presence on the largest island, where the islands went (back) to Mauritius. The United Kingdom had to go along with it.
And then more recently, as I set out over at Prospect, the United States changed its mind – well, President Trump did. And again, the United Kingdom had to go along with it.
The curious thing is that the islands have an immense symbolic hold on the conservative mind as a surviving remnant of British imperial power, when the reality is the repeated demonstration of just how weak British power and influence now is over its own territory.
And as the relative international power of the United Kingdom continues to decline, we will no doubt have more examples of the contest between symbolism and reality.
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Supporting Argentina’s claims for the Falklands looking like a promising candidate for Trump to help his mate Milei and show how little the UK means to him at the same time.
I was going to say myself – watch that space in the South Atlantic. One possibly important difference being that the inhabitants prefer the status quo unlike with the Chagos Islands.
The UK is required by an ICJ ruling, sought by the UN General Assembly, to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. That the US President accepted this was incidental. The fact that the President recently changed his mind, not on principle but in a fit of pique, is equally incidental. If anything it’s convenient for Starmer to park the deal, as it has become a political pot hole for him.
It’s not Britain’s weakness that is revealed but further evidence that trying to please President Trump to gain favour is both futile and damaging. Starmer could have ignored Trump and proceeded with the deal. The USA does not have a veto on British foreign policy. It was convenient for him to acquiesce.
Perhaps the more historically minded will remind me how long it has been since Britons went around sneering at continentals, going on about buccaneering wasn’t it?
Another example is the embarrassing position we have got ourselves into with the Gulf states. Harold Wilson’s government recognised all the way back in 1965 that British bases in the Middle East had become a liability and closed them from 1968 onwards. While decried at the time and since by Conservatives for being “defeatist”, the decisions were pragmatic insofar as the Civil Service rightly advised that Gulf energy was being supplied to us on exactly the same terms as to other European nations; Britain was not getting any discount or post-1967 embargo exemption in return for its protection, and the bases were becoming targets of local unrest.
The logic was sound, but the Conservatives still attacked Labour for the East of Suez decisions forty-six years later when they announced the re-establishment of permanent British bases in the Gulf. This probably seemed like a risk-free proposition in the years 2013 to 2018, with Iran’s nuclear programme constrained by the JCPOA and its precursor; Britain could win favour with the US for burden sharing in the Gulf during the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” and could use permanent bases as evidence of commitment to help secure arms sales.
That logic quietly disintegrated with the end of the JCPOA under Trump I. However, with “Global Britain” in vogue after the Leave vote, it would have been politically unthinkable for the Tories to have closed the bases, whether or not they had the sense to realise that the token presence would again become a real liability. And since then, we have been criticised on multiple occasions by the Gulf regimes for not sending enough forces to defend our “bases”, generously constructed at their expense, when Iran has periodically mounted attacks.
The idea that Britain should still be helping to protect some of the wealthiest states in the world is in my opinion a symptom of imperial nostalgia, cleverly manipulated by Gulf leaders and the USA to keep our hand in the regional mangle. Any GDP profits taken from the relatively modest arms sales over that period have surely been wiped many times over by the cost of sending a Typhoon squadron to augment the defence of Qatar, the cost of British munitions expended across the region, and the financial and opportunity costs of sending a destroyer to “open” the Strait of Hormuz.
Our energy is still purchased at market rate while the Americans and Iranians dictate the terms of trade. All in all, quite a similar set of geopolitical circumstances to those which gave Wilson and then Heath the impetus to take Britain into the EEC, but with one big difference: the absence of the superpower rivalry which guaranteed full US commitment to NATO. This makes it very difficult for Starmer to set Euro-Atlantic policy