Heading for a friendly business-seeking visit to China, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer claimed he need not choose between his hosts in the communist dictatorship and his ally, the United States.
This is worse than misguided, for it applies a veneer of impartiality to an administration that, in truth, sides with the tyrants against Britain’s and America’s interests. It is tellingly odd to adopt an even-handed approach toward a tyranny that only five years ago tore up a treaty with Britain so it could suppress freedom in Hong Kong. Britain’s recent experience is of China’s barefaced lying and betrayal.
So why did Starmer recently approve China building its biggest European embassy in the heart of London? It will put a massive hostile spying operation 3 feet from cables transmitting money transactions into and out of London, the biggest financial hub in the world. When, not if, China wants to disrupt the West, it will be ideally placed to do so.
Starmer is also determined to perform what President Donald Trump this month called “an act of great stupidity” by ceding sovereignty over the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean to the Chinese vassal state of Mauritius. The biggest of the Chagos Islands is Diego Garcia, the site of a joint military base from which the U.S. has strike capability across the Middle East and other strategically vital regions.
Britain is doing this despite bipartisan and independent opposition in Britain to a deal that will cost billions of dollars and dismantle its territorial possessions, despite the Chagos Islands defending and and projecting Western power, despite their never having been ruled from Mauritius, despite Chagossians wanting to remain British subjects, despite their being descendants of Africans enslaved by the French and freed by the British, despite their having no ethnic or cultural relationship with the ethnic Indians of Mauritius, and despite China having a policy of building military bases on any outcrop of rock or coral it can lay its hands on.
It should surprise no one that this fiasco is attributable to efforts by left-wingers ashamed of the West’s history and greatness, and determined to dismantle them. Starmer and several close and sharp friends from the “human rights” world are essentially giving China the chance to build a new advanced military operations base and denying self-determination to a vulnerable people because they are ashamed of Britain’s past colonialism.
It involves an odd mixture of arrogance and self-hatred, but we can no longer be surprised by it, for we have again and again seen its extraordinary power to distort moral and strategic calculations. It is glaringly present, for example, in the mass importation on both sides of the Atlantic of migrants from incompatible and hostile cultures. It is there, too, in the Left lionizing terrorists and condemning Israel for defending itself since Oct. 7, 2023.
LEFTIST DISORDER IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG
The single strongest hope for the people of the Chagos Islands, for strategic sanity, for impeding China, and for the continued strength of the West that Diego Garcia represents, is that Trump will nix the handover.
Britain is under a treaty obligation to the U.S. to retain sovereignty, and Trump should make it do so. If he doesn’t, he’ll be allowing Britain to learn and act on the Chinese lesson that international treaties may be broken with impunity.
