Britain and the United States have just had their most serious falling-out since the 2024 election. Their quarrel was notionally over a leaseback deal for their joint military base on Diego Garcia, but in truth it was about international law. This time, and I say it as one of his critics, President Donald Trump was 100% in the right.
A little history: When Britain was thrusting independence on its colonies in the 1960s, the U.S. asked for a base on Diego Garcia, an atoll with a matchless strategic location halfway between Africa and Indonesia. Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Archipelago, which had been ceded by France to Britain in 1814 at the end of the Napoleonic War. Britain obliged, turning the islands into the British Indian Ocean Territory and relocating their population — around 1,800 people — to Mauritius and the Seychelles to make room for the military installation.
There things rested until the early years of the 21st century, when Mauritius began to draw closer to China. After years of lobbying, Mauritius was able to cobble together an anti-colonialist majority in the United Nations and get a ruling from the International Court of Justice, which at the time included a Russian and a Chinese judge, to the effect that the islands had been unjustly detached from Mauritius prior to independence.
It was a ludicrous decision: the islands had never belonged to Mauritius, the descendants of the evicted population had no desire to be Mauritian citizens and, to put the matter beyond doubt, Mauritius had gladly accepted a cash payment in in 1965 in exchange for renouncing any theoretical right to, as its first post-independence prime minister, Seewoosagur Ramgoolam put it, a “territory of which very few people knew, which is very far from here, and which we had never visited”.
Any self-respecting government would have told the ICJ to buzz off, perhaps using a stronger word than buzz. Apart from anything else, Britain had accepted the court’s authority only on the basis that it could not rule on disputes between Commonwealth or ex-Commonwealth countries, a stipulation intended precisely to forestall cases such as this.
But Britain is literally run by a human rights lawyer, Keir Starmer, one of the few politicians genuinely to live up to the Make America Great Again caricature of the self-hating pantywaist Brit. Starmer put together a terrible deal in which the United Kingdom would cede sovereignty over the islands to Mauritius and then, incredibly, pay around $50 billion to lease back the base for 99 years. The Biden administration, which also felt an exaggerated sense of obligation to supranational courts, went along with the deal. The Trump administration, after more than a year of wrangling, blocked it.
There is a lot to be said for the post-1945 international order. The world is a happier and wealthier place when countries don’t invade one another without consequences. Trump’s obvious contempt for that norm, whether over Ukraine or Greenland, is reprehensible. In fairness, though, the chief beneficiaries of the old order, namely the human rights lawyers, did more to destroy it than Trump ever did, not least through crazy decisions like this one.
Before the 1990s, international law tended to limit itself to international issues: the treatment of diplomatic personnel, the treatment about prisoners of war, the prosecution of crimes on the high seas, and so on. It generally took war crimes or genocide to bring international law into a state’s domestic affairs.
More recently, though, supranational courts have taken to demanding that countries do all manner of things their citizens have voted against, such as extend the right to vote to felons or cut their carbon emissions faster. There was, naturally, a backlash. The phrase “human rights” is now pejorative for most people, which is odd when you think of the literal meaning of the words.
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As usually happens in politics, the backlash has become excessive. Not content with limiting the jurisdiction of international courts, we are throwing out the whole package: free trade, the unacceptability of altering borders by force, stable alliances, the works. I would not be in the least surprised if the U.N. itself collapses, although it may continue to exist on paper for a few decades more. In the manner of the Holy Roman Empire, its power is gone.
Returning to naked power politics, to Hobbes’s “war of all against all”, will be enormously expensive and dangerous, as much for the sharks as for the minnows. We will look back yearningly on what we are leaving behind. Let’s not kid ourselves, though. It was the Starmers of this world who did for the old system. The Trumps were just the means of its destruction.
