Britain has paused its agreement to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius, after US President Donald Trump publicly condemned the deal during his first face-to-face meeting with Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting confirmed on Wednesday that the agreement, in its current form, cannot go ahead, citing the absence of American support as a decisive factor.
The two leaders met on Tuesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Seated beside Burnham, Trump declared the deal "terrible" and said he expected the British prime minister to reconsider it. Burnham nodded and replied "yep", later telling reporters that Britain would "work hard" to resolve the issue and was "confident we can find it working with our US partners". Streeting, speaking to the BBC, said Trump's objections were "not news" to the government, but that the president's latest remarks provided "absolute clarity" that Washington's position was not changing. He also confirmed that Britain would not, for now, make the annual payments of at least £120 million it had agreed to pay Mauritius to lease back the military base on Diego Garcia.
The Chagos Islands are a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Britain separated them from Mauritius in 1965, three years before Mauritius gained independence, forcibly relocating thousands of islanders — primarily to Mauritius itself. The largest island, Diego Garcia, hosts a strategically vital joint US-UK air base. The deal, negotiated by Burnham's predecessor Keir Starmer, would have returned sovereignty of the archipelago to Mauritius, with Britain then leasing the Diego Garcia base for 99 years in exchange for annual payments. Starmer had argued the agreement was legally necessary, noting that both the International Court of Justice and the UN General Assembly had ruled that Britain's continued administration of the islands was unlawful.
Trump initially supported the agreement before turning against it sharply, calling it "an act of great stupidity". His opposition has created persistent friction between Washington and London for months. Streeting pushed back against calls from the opposition Conservative Party to abandon the deal entirely, warning that an "ostrich strategy of sticking our heads in the sand" was unwise given Diego Garcia's importance as a national security asset. Analysts suggest Burnham's immediate priority is to prevent the issue from overshadowing his broader foreign policy agenda — which includes Ukraine, the Middle East, and AI regulation — rather than achieving a swift resolution on Chagos itself.