LONDON — Britain has put its plan to transfer the Chagos Islands to Mauritius on hold after President Donald Trump’s administration withdrew U.S. support for the agreement tied to the future of the Diego Garcia military base, April 11, 2026. The move marks the biggest setback yet for a deal London had argued would protect the joint U.K.-U.S. base while closing a sovereignty dispute that has shadowed the archipelago for decades.
According to Reuters’ report on Saturday’s pause, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government is trying to regain Washington’s formal backing. AP’s latest account of the setback said British officials have effectively frozen the implementing legislation after acknowledging it is no longer moving forward in the current parliamentary session. Trump had previously backed the arrangement before turning against it this year.
Why the Chagos Islands deal has stalled
The Chagos Islands deal stalled because the sovereignty handover and the security framework were never separate political questions. British officials say Diego Garcia remains the priority, but they have also made clear they will not proceed without U.S. support. Once Washington reversed itself, the entire structure lost the outside guarantee London had relied on to sell the package.
The reversal also reopens attacks from critics who said the U.K. was giving up too much, taking on unnecessary geopolitical risk and sidelining Chagossians, the people removed from the islands decades ago to make way for the base. For supporters of the agreement, the pause is damaging for the opposite reason: they argued the treaty was the safest way to shield Diego Garcia from future legal and diplomatic challenge.
How the Chagos Islands deal was supposed to work
The framework first appeared in the October 2024 joint statement between Britain and Mauritius and was later codified in the treaty published by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. Together they set out a formula in which Mauritius would take sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago while Britain retained authority to operate Diego Garcia for an initial 99-year period.
That formula was driven by more than diplomacy. The 2019 advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice intensified pressure on Britain to end its administration of the islands, and London argued that a negotiated settlement was the surest way to keep Diego Garcia insulated from future challenge.
How the Chagos Islands deal reached this point
The story did not begin this week. Reuters reported in December 2024 on Chagossian demands for a direct say in the talks, making clear that sovereignty and security were not the only issues in play. When the agreement finally made it over the line, Reuters’ May 2025 coverage of the treaty signing showed how narrowly the pact survived legal and political resistance in London.
By early 2026, the deal was already under fresh strain. AP’s January 2026 explainer on Trump’s criticism traced how the president had turned on an agreement his administration had previously welcomed. That sequence matters now because it shows the current freeze is not a one-day disruption but the culmination of months of political drift, competing legal claims and unresolved questions over who gets to decide the islands’ future.
What happens next
For now, Britain is left defending the logic of a deal it cannot complete. Mauritius still wants the sovereignty transfer finished. The United States still wants uninterrupted access to Diego Garcia. Chagossians still want meaningful consultation on return, rights and representation. None of those objectives disappears just because the treaty is stalled.
That leaves the Chagos Islands at the same hard intersection that produced the deal in the first place: decolonization, alliance politics and military strategy. Unless London and Washington find a new way to square those interests, the handover plan looks less like a delayed settlement and more like a diplomatic framework in search of a political base.
