Is the Chagos deal safe?

International Law and Geopolitics

Formal sovereignty is acknowledged, while substantive control is retained through strategic, security, or technical arrangements that evolve quietly over time

By Shyam Bhatia

The agreement to restore sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, while allowing the United States to retain military facilities on Diego Garcia, has been presented as a settled and irreversible outcome — legally sound, diplomatically endorsed, and morally overdue. For Mauritius, it marked the correction of a long-standing colonial injustice. For Britain, a means of closing an increasingly untenable chapter. For Washington, a way to preserve strategic continuity in the Indian Ocean.

On paper, the alignment appears stable.

Yet recent developments in both US domestic enforcement and foreign policy raise a legitimate question: how secure are international agreements that depend not on enforcement, but on restraint, in an era when power is increasingly asserted first and justified later?

Two events from early January illuminate this concern.

In Minnesota, a 37-year-old woman, Renee Nicole Good, was shot dead during a federal immigration operation involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Federal authorities defended the agent’s actions as self-defence. Local officials, including the mayor of Minneapolis, publicly rejected that account, accusing federal agents of reckless use of power. Video footage circulated online appeared to contradict claims of imminent threat. Investigations are ongoing, and legal responsibility will be determined by courts.

What matters here is not the eventual verdict, but the pattern: a widening scope for coercive federal action, defended after the fact, with accountability contested rather than assured. Immigration enforcement in the United States has increasingly taken on a performative, highly visible, security-first character, with local and federal authorities operating at odds.

At the same time, far beyond US borders, Washington carried out a dramatic military operation in Venezuela, triggering international criticism and condemnation at the United Nations. UN officials warned that the action violated principles of sovereignty and international law and risked further destabilising an already fragile global order. The US response was unapologetic, framed in the language of necessity and security.

These two episodes — one domestic, one international — are often discussed separately. They should not be. Together, they illustrate a governing approach in which law is treated less as a prior constraint than as a framework for post-hoc justification when security imperatives are invoked.

This is not a new phenomenon. As Henry Kissinger once observed bluntly in an interview with Der Spiegel:

“The United States has never accepted the idea that international law should constrain its freedom of action.”

Kissinger’s remark was not a confession of lawlessness, but a statement of doctrine. It reflected a long-standing belief that great powers retain ultimate discretion when core interests are at stake.

That belief has only hardened in recent years. As Robert Kagan wrote in ‘The Jungle Grows Back’:

“The ‘rules-based international order’ exists only as long as powerful nations are willing to defend it — and, when they believe it necessary, to bend or break the rules.”

This framework connects Minnesota and Venezuela. In both cases, necessity is asserted first, legality debated later. Thresholds shift. Exceptional measures normalise. Political costs diminish.

Why does this matter for Mauritius?

Because the Chagos agreement ultimately depends not on courts or enforcement mechanisms, but on continued political willingness by powerful actors to honour legal commitments even when strategic calculations change. Mauritius won its case through patient diplomacy, international adjudication, and moral clarity. Few decolonisation claims were argued more meticulously or vindicated more clearly.

But legal victory does not automatically translate into durable security.

Diego Garcia is not an abstract territory. It is a critical US military asset in a region of intensifying strategic competition. As global tensions rise and security rationales expand, history suggests that bases, access arrangements, and “temporary” accommodations have a tendency to outlive the circumstances that justified them.

This does not mean the Chagos deal will unravel. There is no evidence of imminent reversal. But the confidence with which the agreement is often described as irreversible deserves scrutiny. International arrangements are only as strong as the political culture that sustains them. When powerful states demonstrate, repeatedly, that rules yield to necessity elsewhere, smaller states are entitled to ask whether their hard-won legal gains are truly insulated from that logic.

For former colonial territories, this pattern is familiar. Formal sovereignty is acknowledged, while substantive control is retained through strategic, security, or technical arrangements that evolve quietly over time. The language remains cooperative; the paperwork immaculate. But the balance of power remains largely unchanged.

The lesson of the present global moment is not that international law is irrelevant. It is that law no longer enforces itself. Rights secured through courts and diplomacy require sustained political vigilance long after declarations are signed and headlines fade.

For Mauritius, the Chagos settlement remains a landmark achievement. Ensuring that it remains meaningful — in practice as well as in principle — will depend on continued scrutiny, international engagement, and a clear-eyed understanding of how rapidly norms are being tested elsewhere.

The deal may be concluded.  
The question of its durability is not.

London – January 8, 2026

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 16 January 2026