Trump weighs US purchase of Chagos Islands to lock down Diego Garcia base
The Trump administration is drawing up options to take direct control of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius once sovereignty over the archipelago transfers from Britain, including a proposal for the United States to purchase the territory outright, The Telegraph reported on 7 June 2026. The plan is one of several under review in Washington as London prepares to cede sovereignty under a 2024 agreement that reserved the Diego Garcia military base under a 99-year lease to the United Kingdom. The reporting was carried by Telegram channels OSINT Live, Clash Report and War Field Witness within hours of the Telegraph's publication.
The reporting recasts a near-final decolonisation story as an open imperial scramble. Mauritius is positioned to win formal sovereignty — the long-standing demand of Port Louis and of successive United Nations rulings — but the base that made the islands strategically important to the West would stay in Western hands indefinitely, now under a US flag rather than a Union Jack. The deal crystallises a question that has hung over the Chagos file since the October 2024 UK-Mauritius treaty: does sovereignty without the base amount to a real transfer, or to a managed reversion of the colonial lease?
The proposed arrangement
According to the 7 June 2026 reporting carried by the Telegram channels OSINT Live, Clash Report and War Field Witness, citing The Telegraph, the White House has begun modelling direct US acquisition of the Chagos archipelago once sovereignty passes from London to Port Louis. Diego Garcia — the atoll that hosts a joint UK-US military installation used as a staging hub for long-range bomber missions, maritime surveillance and signals intelligence — is the operative target. Britain would complete the agreed handover; the United States would step into the role of long-term custodian, either by purchasing the territory outright or by negotiating a separate basing arrangement with the new sovereign.
The framing matters. Until now, the conversation has been about whether the UK-Mauritius treaty of October 2024 — under which London recognised Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos archipelago while retaining operating rights to Diego Garcia for an initial 99-year period — could survive a Trump White House sceptical of multilateral inheritance. The Telegraph report suggests the answer is to flatten the inheritance question entirely. If Washington owns the islands outright, the base's legal status becomes a bilateral US-Mauritius matter rather than a question of post-imperial continuity.
The October 2024 framework and what changes
The October 2024 UK-Mauritius treaty, the product of years of negotiations and a 2019 International Court of Justice advisory opinion, was structured to satisfy both the ICJ's call for decolonisation and the operational demands of the US-UK base. Mauritius received sovereignty; the UK retained a renewable lease on Diego Garcia; the United States operated on the base under existing UK arrangements. Critics in Port Louis and in the African Union argued the deal was sovereignty in form and continuity in substance, but it had a defensible legal architecture.
The new option, if pursued, would invert that architecture. A US purchase — even after the British handover — would leave Mauritius the formal sovereign on paper for a matter of months before alienating the territory to a second foreign power. The Chagossians, the archipelago's indigenous population removed in the 1960s and 1970s to make way for the base, are unlikely to feature in the transaction at all. Their right of return, an increasingly live question in UK and international courts, is precisely the kind of complication a US acquisition would seek to extinguish.
Strategic stakes in the Indian Ocean
The base question sits inside a wider realignment. Diego Garcia sits astride sea lanes connecting the Persian Gulf, the Horn of Africa and the Strait of Malacca — the maritime corridor through which most of the world's oil shipments and a rising share of container traffic pass. US Central Command and US Africa Command have used Diego Garcia as a launchpad for bomber task forces rotated into the Gulf, as a refuelling node for unmanned surveillance flights over the Indian Ocean, and as a hardening site for prepositioned equipment.
A US-owned Chagos would insulate the base from any future Mauritian government that might seek to renegotiate the lease, from any future UK government that might reconsider the underlying treaty, and from the slow drift of international maritime law that has begun to chip at the legal foundations of overseas military installations. Beijing has watched the Chagos file closely: the base's reach covers the SLOCs that Chinese energy imports and the bulk of the world's containerised trade transit, and Indian strategists have long treated Diego Garcia as a forward node in any Indo-Pacific contingency. A direct US flag on the islands narrows the strategic options for every other Indian Ocean power.
The trade is that the United States would inherit a political liability — owning territory on which it has, in effect, displaced a population — in exchange for durable basing rights.
Counterpoint: sovereignty, or a managed reversion?
The case for the deal, as the Trump administration would frame it, is that decolonisation in form is meaningless if the base the decolonisation was organised around continues to operate indefinitely under Western command. Better, in that reading, to put the base on a clean legal footing with the United States as owner than to maintain a UK-Mauritius lease that becomes a periodic source of friction. The argument has internal logic: the present arrangement is a legal compound — a sovereignty in Mauritius, a lease in London, a basing right in Washington — that each of the three governments could in principle unwind on its own timeline.
The counter-case runs through Port Louis and through the Chagossian community. For Mauritius, the 2024 treaty was the vindication of a fifty-year diplomatic campaign; transferring sovereignty to Washington within months of receiving it would be a humiliation dressed up as realpolitik. For the Chagossians, who have never been consulted in any of the post-2024 arrangements and whose resettlement claims remain active in UK and international fora, an outright US purchase is the third iteration of dispossession: first British removal, then a treaty that did not include them, and now an Anglo-American resale to a third sovereign. The Mauritian government has, in successive UN General Assembly votes, framed the Chagos question as a matter of completed decolonisation; a US purchase would reopen that file in the General Assembly's Special Committee on Decolonisation and at The Hague.
What remains unresolved is whether the Telegraph report reflects a settled White House position or one of several scenarios under review. The reporting, carried on 7 June 2026, describes the purchase as "one of several options" being modelled — language that leaves open the possibility that the status quo, or a renegotiated lease, prevails. London has not publicly responded to the specifics; Mauritius has not been asked to respond to a proposal that has not, in any published form, been put to it.
This article treats the Chagos handover as a decolonisation file with continuing Indian Ocean security consequences, rather than as a base-tenancy story with a colonial backdrop — a framing the British press has tended to invert.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagos_Archipelago
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritius