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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   5443 thread views

Transnational Thursday for May 22, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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UK pays Mauritius to take administrative ownership of strategic Indian Ocean base: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-set-sign-deal-ceding-sovereignty-chagos-islands-mauritius-2025-05-22/

LONDON, May 22 (Reuters) - Britain signed a deal on Thursday to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, after a London judge overturned a last-minute injunction and cleared the way for an agreement the government says is vital to protect the nation's security.

The multibillion-dollar deal will allow Britain to retain control of the strategically important U.S.-UK air base on Diego Garcia, the largest island of the archipelago in the Indian Ocean, under a 99-year lease.

Legalism gone mad, nobody is capable of taking Diego Garcia off the UK/US. Mauritius is a very poor and weak country and can be safely ignored. A quick glimpse at a map also reveals that Mauritius is thousands of kilometres away from Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos islands, there's really no reason to pay them to take over the area just so the base can be kept just because they were once classified as part of the same British Indian Ocean Territory.

Some element of the British decisionmaking process seems to be based on a need for international legitimacy, that paying Mauritius makes them more holy and virtuous: https://x.com/echetus/status/1841815818700492945

What changed official attitudes and broke the logjam were international judgments, the loss after 71 years of the UK seat on the ICJ held by Sir Christopher Greenwood in November 2017 and UK isolation in the UN bought on by the UK's perceived diminishing reputation for upholding international law and the UK stand on Russia's invasion of Ukraine which exposed HMG to charges of hypocrisy

Someone needs to tell these Brits that they're a P5 power. They cannot, by definition, be isolated in the UN and have anything bad happen to them other than condemnation. If you don't like an ICJ order, you can just ignore it. No such ICJ order actually happened, so Britain doesn't even need to ignore them. The US told the ICJ to get stuffed when they said 'don't go in on Nicaragua'. Israel couldn't care less what the ICJ says, they're not suddenly going to give the Palestinians East Jerusalem, let alone pay reparations. The Security Council are the ultimate court in the UN and the UK enjoys a veto there.

Soft power like the British state seems to yearn for is nothing without real power, it's a pure longhouse concept. Real power is concrete: boots on the ground, bridges built or bombs dropped. Unfortunately, the longhouse is very real if you believe in it.

The financial component of the deal includes 3 billion pounds to be paid by Britain to Mauritius over the 99-year term of the agreement, with an option for a 50-year extension and Britain maintaining the right of first refusal thereafter.

The base's capabilities are extensive and strategically crucial. Recent operations launched from Diego Garcia include bombing strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen in 2024-2025, humanitarian aid deployments to Gaza and, further back, attacks on Taliban and al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan in 2001.

Some have alleged that there's some kind of corruption behind the deal, Starmer is known to associate with all kinds of subversive elements like human rights lawyers, some of whom are associated with Mauritius. But then he is a human rights lawyer, so that's to be expected. Who can tell the difference between corruption and treachery? Showing weakness here also opens up other problems for the UK in Gibraltar and the Falklands.

https://x.com/G0ADM/status/1925609246101807510

Sending billions to a foreign country is also perverse given that the UK is in a poor fiscal position and must impose painful cuts or tax hikes to stabilize the situation. One can observe a hierarchy of needs in modern British governance:

  1. Housing asylum seekers
  2. Paying foreign countries to take your land, so you can keep a base you already have
  3. Taxiing 'disabled' children to and from school (a mandated expense that's bankrupting councils and enriching taxi companies)
  4. Equalising pay between the sexes working different jobs at market rates, at the whim of random judges (also bankrupting major cities and resulting in third world sanitation disasters)
  5. Maintaining a vast social housing system in expensive parts of London housing, amongst others, the First Lady of Sierra Leone.

Very far down the list is anything associated with economic growth or military power.

https://x.com/echetus/status/1841815818700492945

What a doormat. It’s like the opposite of the maga failure mode where you’re so paranoid about getting screwed that you end up hurting yourself by damaging mutually beneficial relationships. Is it too much to ask for politicians with a healthy sense of self-interest, that don’t constantly feel either exploited or exploitative?

Trump is good at identifying problems. Terrible at implementing solutions. Rise of china was fueled by hollowing of the rust belt, Europe is not paying for it's defense, multinational companies do take disproportionate profits from US and so on, immigration and birthright citizenships are loopholes, the universities are too woke ... he just doesn't have the proper managing capacity to solve them right. And he is just using brute force and clumsily.

The man looks at a madagascaran girl in rags picking vanilla beans and sees the american people being taken advantage of. He ain‘t right in the head. Better than starmer who hands her the nearest military base, but still.

This chagos episode recontextualises the tariff deal with britain for me. I did not understand why britain would agree to such terrible terms, maybe it meant britain was weaker than I thought, but now I realize it‘s just starmer being happy to always give in at whatever terms the other side offers.

Even if one interprets trump‘s tariff policy goals maximally charitably (de-coupling from china, avoiding trade deficitis), none of them apply to britain, your most accomodating ally who you don‘t even have a trade deficit against.

It reminds me of that scene in The Long Goodbye where the mob boss breaks a coke bottle on his girlfriend‘s face, and while she screams in pain and desperation at being permanently disfigured, he threatens Marlowe: "Her, I love. You, I don‘t even like."

This chagos episode recontextualises the tariff deal with britain for me. I did not understand why britain would agree to such terrible terms, maybe it meant britain was weaker than I thought, but now I realize it‘s just starmer being happy to always give in at whatever terms the other side offers.

Hypothesis: Like America, Britain has a constant war between the isolationists and the anti-isolationists. Labour under Starmer are anti-isolationist and so enjoy collaborating with other countries as much as possible, mostly regardless of the actual cost-benefit to the UK.

There seems to be a weird phenomena among formally powerful people and nations where once they no longer actually have the power they once had, they fall back on formality, legalism, and ceremonial trappings. It’s really funny once you actually see it, or at least when it’s not happening to your side of the argument. Countries that once had a military presence that the world feared now politely go about hat in hand to beg their former subjects to do something and paying them to do it. Political entities that once reshaped nations now reduced to issuing letters or rulings and impotently asking the people with actual power to listen to them.

When you start seeing groups become formal, you know they lack either the power or the will to be powerful. The UK hasn’t been much of a power since the Second World War. It’s unlikely they will hold such power this century.

This has to be viewed generationally, though. It wasn't simply the nations that were in power, but it was the people and society of that generation that gained and wielded the power. However, people individually are not very powerful, so the institutions are established that convey the justification for the power held by various monarchs, emperors, aristocrats and increasingly, representative Heads of State. The law was established to keep power in place and in the right hands as well as impart and protect the rights of the "citizens" (i.e. people whose worth is recognized by the State) over outsiders. It has always felt a bit like a Mafia hierarchy and protection racket only on a massive omni-social scale.

Over time, though, the inheritors of the power come to equate the laws and rules with the power itself. In the modern era, where the government ideally represents and acts as stewards of the democratic, collective power of the citizen's consent, the formality of rules and laws grows to byzantine proportions and most often, it is used by internal factions of the government to stymie the use (or what some consider abuse) of executive power by their opponents. People that never really had to obtain or use real power are more concerned that it may used against them and the formal systems of a "rules-based" society are emphasized to prevent any quick or decisive action or overt use of overwhelming power on anyone's part.

It may not necessarily be so much that formerly powerful nations or empires become more concerned with legality, propriety and formal procedure, but instead, maybe that by becoming more diplomatic and bureaucratic, a nation also loses power as they are bound more by their own rules than supported by them.

Who has behaved this way apart from the UK? France certainly hasn't.

The French literally yielded fully to a minor colonial revolt months ago because they attempted to give their own citizens right to vote in the territory in which they lived, diluting the native vote share. They reversed the change and now seem likely never to implement it.

France hasn’t been a superpower since Napoleon. I mean im pretty sure 1900s France was doing the “stop or I’ll send a letter to the League of Nations” up until they got invaded in WW1.

IDK whether the term ‘superpower’ makes sense applied to Victorian countries, but France was unquestionably a top five most powerful country in the world in 1900 and was able to push around other great powers with impunity, and had recently done so with the Ottoman Empire.

I mean im pretty sure 1900s France was doing the “stop or I’ll send a letter to the League of Nations” up until they got invaded in WW1.

Your timeline is off. League of nations was created after WWI. And France was both massive colonial empire and they fought quite the good fight in WWI.

They still had a colonial empire and weren't paying other countries to take their possessions off their hands.

Rumours are that Keir Starmer was the basis for Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones. A handsome, intelligent human rights lawyer, the perfect man for a neurotic woman in the Cool Britannia years.

I guess this is what governance by human rights lawyers looks like, doing anything, regardless of how stupid, if international/human rights law says we have to.

In the UK we have an expression 'the Blob', which is something like our version of the Deep State. A collection of civil servants, QUANGOs, tribunals, the BBC and lawyers. Keir Starmer is the Blob personified.

Rumours are that Keir Starmer was the basis for Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones.

Fielding all but confirmed that he was. Odd though, because while he was certainly handsome in his youth, a big part of Mark Darcy’s handsomeness is his voice, and Keir Starmer has a bad case of Kermit voice.

Man, at this rate we might get back the Falklands by Milei's second term.

My money would be on Gibraltar first.

Agreed. The emotional connection after the war is much stronger with the Falklands; Britain hasn’t fought against Spain in a long time and, in exchange for enough freebies (easy residency for British retirees, an exemption from the new non-EU housing taxes, €10bn which is probably viable now that the Spanish economy is doing better) the public would probably acquiesce. The Falklands I think are unlikely.

The most interesting suggestion I heard (perhaps here? Can't remember) was that Spain would allow Gibraltar to be used as a processing center for migrants on their way to the UK. Not sure why that would be much of a bonus when the UK could use Gibraltar for that reason right now, but then I'm not sure what the UK is supposed to be getting out of paying Mauritius to take the Chagos Islands either, so who knows.

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