By Kelly Sloan | Contributing Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
I know no one is supposed to like former National Security Advisor John Bolton anymore –- on the left, because he was mean to countries that don’t like us in the UN, and on the right because… well, because Donald Trump said so.
However, he was the guy, after all, who was prescient enough to once quip that if you were to lop off the top 10 stories of the U.N. building, not much would be missed. This was shortly before President George W. Bush made the decision (one of his best) to assign Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., where he served with a singularity shared by the likes of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick; and later went on to write a book, “Surrender is not an Option”, which comes as close to anything we have had in a couple decades prescribing a decipherable foreign policy. So, it is worth sitting up and paying attention when he speaks on foreign policy matters.
The latest matter he has spoken on is another sobering iteration of the failures of leadership and focus concerning international affairs, not only within the Biden administration, but elsewhere in the West. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece from Oct. 16, Bolton describes the lamentably stupid decision of the new British government under Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, to cede the Chagos Islands, a chain in the Indian Ocean that has been a British possession for more than 200 years, to Mauritius. Oh, and to pay Mauritius an annual stipend, for the honor.
Why should we care? Well, it just so happens that those islands are home to a major, and strategically important joint U.S.- U.K. military base at Diego Garcia. It also just so happens that Mauritius is an ally of the People’s Republic of China. Oops.
As Bolton points out, having a deep-sea naval and long range air base in what is just about smack dab in the middle of the Indian Ocean has long been a pretty big deal, and could become even more so: “The island will only become more important to U.S. resistance against China’s efforts to achieve hegemony in the Indo-Pacific,” he writes.
But listen up, those of you in the back of the class, he continues: “Mauritius, meantime, is increasingly China-friendly. China is its top trading partner, and Beijing has used debt-trap diplomacy —- lending with strings attached —- to ensnare the island nation. If the British Parliament approves transferring the Chagos to Mauritius, China will be able to maneuver ships and planes near Diego Garcia for intelligence-gathering and military operations. Given Beijing’s history of militarizing comparable tiny landmasses in the South China Sea, the threat is clear.”
Well, to most of us it’s clear. Perhaps not so much to PM Starmer, whose excision of the Trotskyist wing of the Labour Party seems to be rather incomplete. And certainly not to President Biden, who reportedly pressured Starmer into the ridiculous deal.
It seems, somewhat paradoxically, that the Biden administration was concerned over the future of the Diego Garcia base in the absence of a deal to turn the islands over to Mauritius, wringing their hands over a potential application by Mauritius to the International Court of Justice to turn the islands -– and the base -– over to them. Yes, the same ICJ that completely discredited itself by ruling against Israel earlier this year. So, in what has become de rigeur for the Biden Administration, rather than stand up to the little creeps that make up the anti-Western cabal at ICJ and U.N., on behalf of our own and our allies national interests, Biden’s State Department told Starmer that refusing to give away an important part of Britain’s legal sovereign territory would jeopardize the “special relationship” with Washington.
And so he did. In doing so, Starmer -– who ran in large part on a promise to remake Labour into a respectable governing party emancipated from the revolutionary instincts of his far-left predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn — fulfilled one of Corbyn’s biggest wishes. So much for the claw-back from the leftist fringe.
Incidentally, in a bit of historical irony, no one appears to have asked the native Chagossians, who have been protesting the deal, what they think; it seems many of them do not want to be handed over to Mauritius, a country whose ties to the islands are nebulous at best, and who don’t tend to treat the Chagosians very well. They evidently seem to prefer being British to possibly being pawns of the PRC. Go figure.
There was no good reason to do this, beyond a simplistic -– and dangerous -– expression of leftist colonial guilt. There is a good reason for having a Western footprint in that part of the world and maintaining a deep seaport and airbase on a strategic sea channel. If we have forgotten this, the Chinese certainly haven’t.
Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to international affairs as a “grand Chessboard”; that is a pretty good analogy, and the West under the leadership of Biden-Starmer is playing the wrong game, and playing even that poorly.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.