Indian Ocean Islands as the New Fault Line of Global Power: Diego Garcia, Trump, and the Rewriting of Chagos Sovereignty
Geo Political Correspondent
The Indian Ocean, long treated by global powers as a secondary theatre compared to the Atlantic and Pacific, is rapidly emerging as the next great geopolitical fault line. From the Red Sea to the Malacca Strait, from undersea cables to forward-deployed military bases, the ocean that links Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia is becoming a decisive arena of twenty-first century power politics. At the heart of this transformation lies a small, coral atoll that rarely features in popular maps but looms large in strategic calculations: Diego Garcia.
Recent statements attributed to former U.S. President Donald Trump, reportedly describing any handover of Diego Garcia as an “act of great stupidity,” have reignited a debate that was assumed to be legally settled following the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion and subsequent United Nations resolutions calling for the return of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius. Instead of closure, the issue has entered a new phase, one defined not by decolonisation rhetoric alone but by raw geopolitics. In this emerging context, Sri Lanka and the Maldives have reportedly received “green lights” from Trump-era strategic thinking to reassert a joint historical claim over Diego Garcia, fundamentally altering the frame through which sovereignty over Chagos is discussed.
This moment mirrors, in important respects, the United States’ revived interest in Greenland. In both cases, Washington’s logic is not rooted in nostalgia or legality but in strategic denial: preventing adversaries from gaining leverage over critical geography. Diego Garcia, hosting one of the most important U.S. military facilities outside American territory, is simply too valuable to be subjected to what U.S. strategists perceive as legal idealism detached from security realities.
Diego Garcia and the Strategic Centrality of the Indian Ocean
Diego Garcia’s importance is not symbolic; it is operational. The atoll functions as a forward logistics hub, airbase, and naval support facility enabling U.S. power projection across the Middle East, East Africa, and South Asia. From Afghanistan to Iraq, from deterrence against Iran to surveillance of Chinese naval movements, Diego Garcia has been indispensable.
As China expands its naval footprint through the so-called “string of pearls,” and as Russia seeks renewed relevance in the Indian Ocean via African and Middle Eastern partnerships, U.S. tolerance for uncertainty around Diego Garcia has sharply diminished. In this context, Trump’s reported opposition to handing the island to Mauritius should not be read as a personal eccentricity, but as a blunt articulation of a deeper bipartisan consensus within the American strategic establishment.
The Indian Ocean is no longer a permissive environment. It is contested, crowded, and increasingly militarised. Control, or at least denial of control to rivals, has become the operative principle.
Sri Lanka, Maldives, and a Joint Reassertion of Historical Rights
What is new, and potentially transformative, is the re-emergence of Sri Lanka and the Maldives as historical stakeholders in the Chagos question. Unlike Mauritius, whose claim rests almost entirely on colonial administrative arrangements instituted by the British in the mid-twentieth century, the Maldivian claim is rooted in pre-colonial history, maritime geography, and long-standing recognition by non-European powers.
Historical records and maps confirm that Diego Garcia, known locally as Foalhavahi, was culturally and geographically linked to the Maldivian island world. Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British powers all recognised the Maldives as a sovereign polity and maintained diplomatic relations with its Sultan. It is implausible that these powers could have occupied or utilised islands understood locally as Maldivian while simultaneously misrepresenting their identity and location to the Maldivian court.
The divergence between early cartographic practice and later imperial mapping reflects not innocent confusion but imperial consolidation and administrative convenience. As European empires rationalised their holdings, cartography became an instrument of governance rather than an objective record of maritime reality. Chagos was gradually detached on paper before it was detached in law.
Sri Lanka’s interest, meanwhile, is both historical and strategic. As a major Indian Ocean littoral state with deep civilisational ties to maritime trade routes, Sri Lanka has long been affected by decisions taken about oceanic space without its participation. A joint Sri Lanka–Maldives position reframes Diego Garcia not as a bilateral dispute between Mauritius and the United Kingdom, but as a multilateral historical question embedded in the wider Indian Ocean system.
Chinese Archives and Pre-Colonial Recognition
One of the most underexamined dimensions of the Chagos debate lies in Chinese historical records. Long before European colonial expansion into the Indian Ocean, Chinese dynastic archives documented the Maldives as a recognised sovereign island polity. These records, spanning multiple dynasties, describe the Maldives as a distinct political entity engaged in tribute relations, maritime trade, and diplomatic exchange.
This recognition is not a minor historiographical footnote. It directly undermines arguments that rely exclusively on colonial administrative arrangements to determine sovereignty over Chagos. If the Maldives existed as a recognised sovereign entity centuries before European arrival, then any detachment of territory traditionally associated with that polity requires far more rigorous justification than colonial convenience provides.
At the same time, this historical record highlights a critical institutional omission in 1946, when the detachment of Chagos proceeded without meaningful United Nations supervision. The post-war international order was still crystallising, and colonial powers exploited this ambiguity to entrench strategic advantages before decolonisation norms fully took hold.
Reintroducing Chinese archival evidence does not reopen settled questions; it corrects an incomplete narrative. Any lawful resolution of the Chagos issue must account for the full span of historical evidence, including pre-colonial recognition preserved outside European archives. Only by doing so can decolonisation be assessed in a manner consistent with historical truth and international legal principle.
The Question of the Chagossian People
The human dimension of the Chagos question has often been simplified, sometimes to the point of distortion. French references to Chagos inhabitants as îliens are not incidental. They reflect an ethnographic recognition incompatible with the notion of a population formed exclusively through African slave importation.
British administrative use of the term “Mozambiques,” by contrast, reflects expediency rather than ethnographic precision. It flattened complex identities into categories useful for labour management. Such terminology should not be mistaken for accurate anthropology.
Taken together, historical, linguistic, and cultural evidence supports a reclassification of the Chagos population as an islander community whose origins align most closely with Maldivian maritime society, subsequently reshaped but not created by colonial labour systems. This distinction matters. It reframes the Chagossians not as a transplanted workforce but as an indigenous island people displaced by strategic imperatives.
This conclusion warrants serious consideration in academic discourse and United Nations deliberations on the future of the Chagos Archipelago. It also strengthens the argument for Maldivian involvement in any durable settlement.
Trump, Greenland, and the Logic of Strategic Denial
Trump’s reported comparison of Diego Garcia to Greenland is instructive. In both cases, the underlying logic is strategic denial: preventing rivals from acquiring leverage over critical geography. For the United States, the identity of the sovereign flag matters less than the certainty that the territory will remain aligned with American security interests.
From this perspective, a joint Sri Lanka–Maldives stewardship arrangement, implicitly backed by Washington, offers an attractive alternative to Mauritian sovereignty coupled with legal uncertainty and potential renegotiation of base rights. It provides continuity without the optics of colonial defiance.
For Sri Lanka and the Maldives, such an arrangement would elevate their strategic relevance while embedding them more deeply in U.S.-led security architecture. For Washington, it would preserve Diego Garcia’s operational utility without overtly contradicting decolonisation principles.
A New Geopolitical Template for the Indian Ocean
If Diego Garcia is resolved through a framework that blends historical correction with contemporary strategic alignment, it could set a precedent for how contested spaces in the Indian Ocean are managed. Rather than binary choices between colonial restitution and strategic control, hybrid arrangements may become the norm.
This would mark a significant departure from post-Cold War assumptions that legal adjudication alone can resolve territorial disputes. In an era of renewed great power competition, law, history, and strategy are once again intertwined.
The Indian Ocean’s islands, once treated as peripheral, are now central. Like Greenland in the Arctic, Diego Garcia illustrates how geography, long ignored, returns with force when global power balances shift.
The debate over Diego Garcia is no longer merely about decolonisation or legal rectification. It is about how history is interpreted, how strategic realities are managed, and how emerging powers navigate an increasingly contested maritime space.
Trump’s reported rejection of a Mauritian handover, Sri Lanka and Maldives receiving strategic “green lights,” and the reintroduction of pre-colonial and Chinese historical evidence together signal a profound shift. The Indian Ocean is becoming a theatre where past and present collide, and where small islands carry disproportionate global weight.
Any future settlement of the Chagos issue that ignores this complexity will fail. The path forward lies not in erasing history or fetishising colonial boundaries, but in constructing arrangements that reflect historical truth, respect islander identity, and acknowledge the hard realities of global power.