Last month’s vote by the United Nations General Assembly to end Britain’s control of the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean has cast a spotlight on the key American military base on Diego Garcia.
The non-binding vote was overwhelmingly in favour of the British Government, which rules the Chagos as a British Indian Ocean Territory, returning them to Mauritius. This came after a similarly non-binding International Court of Justice ruling in February that the Chagos was not legally separated from the Mauritius upon the latter’s independence from British colonial rule in 1965. Diego Garcia is the largest of the Chagos, and Britain has leased the base on it to the Americans up to 2036. The atoll has supported various major operations in the Indian Ocean region in decades past, and its role as a key US military base will continue in the face of an uncertain regional security outlook. As the old axiom goes, ‘geography is destiny’, and Diego Garcia’s location is what makes it such a crucial node in Washington’s Indian Ocean strategy.
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