Despite previously calling it an “act of great stupidity”, Trump signaled his support for Starmer’s Chagos deal.
Published on February 5, 2026
US President Donald Trump appears to have approved British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s deal to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius after calling it a “big stupidity” weeks earlier.
Trump last month called the U.K.’s decision to cede sovereignty over the Indian Ocean archipelago, which includes a joint U.S.-British military base on the island of Diego Garcia, an “act of great stupidity.”
Recommended Stories
List of 3 itemsEnd of the list
The US president said he had productive talks with Starmer on Thursday and that the British leader had made the “best deal he could”.
But in a post on Truth Social, he also warned that the US would retain the right to “militarily secure and reinforce” the US presence on the island of Diego Garcia if it was threatened.
The British government said in a statement that “the leaders agreed that their governments will continue to work closely together to ensure the future operations of the base and will speak again soon,” AFP news agency reported.
Under a deal reached last May, the governments of the United Kingdom and Mauritius jointly announced that full sovereignty of the Chagos, a remote group of more than 60 islands, would return to Mauritius in return for allowing the U.S. military base there to continue operating for the next 99 years.
Last year’s announcement triggered a range of emotions among Chagossians, who were displaced from their island homeland in the 1960s and 1970s and settled in Mauritius, the Seychelles and the United Kingdom. For decades they have been campaigning for a free and unrestricted return to their ancestral land.
The Chagos Islands have been under British control since 1814. In the 1960s and 1970s, Britain forcibly evicted nearly 2,000 locals to make room for the U.S. military base, which played a central role in U.S. military operations in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008, the US also admitted that the base was used for covert rendition flights of “terrorism” suspects.
