The excruciating thing about Donald Trump is that the madder and more unreasonable he seems to become, the more he catches everyone out when he says something that is utterly true. The US president’s manoeuvres on Greenland are the act of a bully and autocrat; for him to suggest that he wants Greenland as compensation for failing to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is babyish. Why does he care about the Nobel Peace Prize when it is awarded by the kind of non-governmental busybodies he has scorned during his five years in office?
It wouldn’t surprise me if Starmer ends up giving Gibraltar to Spain or even the Isle of Wight to France
But then again who, apart from Keir Starmer and his lawyerly friends, can argue with what the president has written on his Truth Social account about the Chagos Islands deal, which he describes as ‘an act of GREAT STUPIDITY’? Trump writes:
‘Shockingly, our ‘brilliant’ Nato ally – the United Kingdom – is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia, the site of a vital US military base, the Mauritius. There is no doubt that China and Russia have noticed this act of total weakness’.
You can bet they will. At a time when the world’s powers are flexing their muscles, Britain’s Prime Minister has chosen to act like a kindly, and possibly demented, old lady who gives away her worldly possessions to a donkey sanctuary, leaving herself shivering and unfed.
As Trump writes, the Chagos Islands are being handed over to Mauritius for no reason at all. It is not an act of respecting people’s right to self-determination because the Chagos Islanders themselves don’t want their home given away to what to them is a foreign country.
If Starmer wanted to earn virtue points on the human rights front, he could have allowed the Chagos Islanders – many of whom were relocated to Crawley in the 1960s – to return to the islands, and given them autonomy on what goes on outside the air base there. The Chagos Islands may have been administered by Mauritius in the latter stages of the British Empire but Mauritius’s claim over the islands is deeply contested. Giving the islands away is nothing but a sop to Starmer’s legal friends who advised the Mauritius government. It is borne of a pedantic obsession with international law – even when the UN court which made the perverse ruling that the Chagos Islands belong to Mauritius has no binding powers over Britain or any other country; it just appears to be a politicised body driven by the ideology of decolonisation.
Were Starmer prime minister of Denmark it is quite possible he would have given Greenland away by now. He wouldn’t even have asked for bounty in return. Some crafty lawyer working for the US president would have come up with a pretext that Britain should pay the US to take Greenland off its hands, and Starmer would have coughed up billions of UK taxpayers’ money. It wouldn’t surprise me if Starmer ends up giving Gibraltar to Spain or even the Isle of Wight to France. Such is the lunacy of the Chagos Islands’ deal that all bets are off the table.
In the meantime, Trump’s comments on the Chagos Islands have left him looking relatively wise. Chagos gives credence to his argument that Europeans cannot be trusted to defend their territory and that consequently Greenland is only safe if it is in American hands. The Chagos deal, indeed, may well be the inspiration behind Trump’s attempted land-grab of Greenland. Starmer made a show of offering his support to Denmark, yet he is part of the reason why Trump is threatening to seize that country’s territory.
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