Donald Trump had a busy January. Just as he withdrew his threat to invade Greenland, he threw a spanner in the works of Keir Starmer’s plan to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Calling Starmer’s deal “an act of great stupidity” on Truth Social, the president inserted Washington into the debate over the future of the little archipelago, a British overseas territory home to an important US military base. But like the obsession with Greenland, what is driving the newfound concern is America’s intensifying geopolitical competition with China.
The Chagos negotiations began in November of 2022 just after the chaotic rise and fall of Liz Truss. When serving as foreign minister, Truss had been cornered by her Mauritian counterpart at the UN General Assembly, who initiated a discussion that Britain had until then wisely avoided. The Chagos Archipelago was a dependency—an administrative colonial designation—of Mauritius when that nation gained independence in 1968, but Britain made an agreement to retain the Chagos. The Mauritians have been claiming the territory on and off since 1982, when the Mauritian Militant Movement first came to power. In 2019, the International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion, ruled in Mauritius’s favor. Although the ruling was not legally binding, Starmer has now negotiated a deal to hand over the islands, and then lease the largest of them, Diego Garcia, home to an Anglo-American military base, for the hefty sum of $137 million a year.
Greenland and Mauritius took two different paths open to colonial possessions and their colonizers after the Second World War. The newly founded United Nations, driven by the stated anticolonialism shared by Washington and Moscow, resolved to put an end to European empires; the Europeans, exhausted by war, could hardly object. There were three available paths to self-determination: full independence, free association, or full incorporation. Under UN Secretary General Dag Hammerskjöld, the goal was two-fold: self-determination and development. Mauritius became fully independent from Britain, while Greenland was incorporated into the Kingdom of Denmark in 1953. Since then, Greenland has gradually gained more autonomy, and is now a self-governing territory.
The Cold War determined the fates of many former colonies. The Soviet Union and the United States, each uneasy about the prospect of Greenland falling into the other’s hands, supported continued Danish possession. For its part, Britain bought the Chagos Islands for the purposes of hosting the American military base in Diego Garcia. The Chagossians who had lived there for generations, most as workers on coconut oil plantations, were displaced to Mauritius; later, many moved to Britain, where most have settled in Crawley, in Sussex.
Alongside the formal processes that accompanied it, decolonization began to acquire a broader meaning, whereby a former colonial metropole, a curriculum, or even a countryside could be in need of “decolonization.” Decolonization, by this logic, became a continuous moral imperative, and its driving force is Western imperial guilt. It was also widely accepted that the official end of colonial rule had led not to true independence but to neo-colonialism. Waning European power had given way to increasing American influence. UN efforts towards global development were also sometimes treated as covertly imperialist, since they suggested there was something superior about Western capitalism and liberal democracy.
The new postcolonial logic made little distinction between the different processes and constitutional agreements that had bookended the imperial era, so it is unsurprising that many of these arrangements are being reconsidered. This was the background of Britain’s talks with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands as well as Denmark’s recent reckoning over Greenland. For instance, in 2025 the Danish prime minister issued an apology for a birth control campaign in which—as a part of Danish modernization efforts—the coil was widely encouraged as contraception in Greenland. Greenlandic women who had coils inserted without their knowledge or proper consultation were offered compensation.
But in the domain of geopolitics, decolonization is a more complicated proposition. Mauritius and the Chagos are entirely the product of colonization: Both were uninhabited when the French first settled in the eighteenth century. As one academic put it, Mauritius is “a flotsam left behind by the wreck of the colonial world.” Greenland is a Scandinavian welfare state on a block of ice which still has no roads connecting major towns. Greenlanders hope to develop more self-sufficiency through tourism and increased access to natural resources, but are for now reliant on Danish financial support for about half of national income.
It is worth noting that Mauritius is not challenging those parts of the 1968 agreement that were beneficial to the Mauritians, which included, among other things, mineral and fishing rights. The Mauritians and their supporters point to the displacement of the Chagossians by the British to bolster their claims, but this has been severely complicated by the fact that the Chagossians themselves oppose returning the islands to Mauritius.
In fact, in Greenland and the Chagos Islands, the “colonized” are on the side of their supposed colonizers. Within Britain, Chagossians are campaigning for their own return to the Chagos Islands, a prospect they consider less likely under Mauritian control. The Trump administration similarly tried to take up the plight of the Greenlanders, and the story about the coil campaign was picked up in the conservative New York Post. But when JD Vance visited Greenland last year, his flight was diverted to the American Pituffik space base at the news of protests, and a whopping 85 percent of Greenlanders oppose an American takeover, with a majority preferring continued Danish rule to that alternative. Applied postcolonial history seems to be little more than an exercise in selective counterfactuals.
In Britain, too, there is much confusion over the exact implications of former imperial wrongs. A report from the think tank Policy Exchange notes that parliamentarians consistently failed to understand that recognizing a “legal obligation” to cede the Chagos to Mauritius would make it impossible for Britain to “negotiate assurances about defense interests, the rights of Chagossians, and the environment.” A “legal obligation” had become just another form of moral posturing, rather than a binding imperative. The opposition, which also supported the deal, was no better than the Tory government. Jeremy Corbyn, when leader of the Labour party, seemed unable to understand that the Mauritian claim to the territory and the ability of the Chagossians to return to their homeland might be in conflict. Starmer’s deal—a negotiated settlement with no clear upsides for Britain, which involves handing territory and cash over to a foreign government—is the ultimate expression of British imperial self-flagellation.
“Imperial guilt is a shallow, self-sabotaging basis for geopolitical strategy.”
In his famous introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that his countrymen ought to “have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment.” Well, Europeans do feel ashamed, but the consequences have proven far from revolutionary. Who are Greenland’s relevant colonizers—the Danes or the looming Americans? Who are the relevant former colonial subjects in the Chagos negotiations—the Mauritians or the Chagossians? Imperial guilt is a shallow, self-sabotaging basis for geopolitical strategy. It is time for European leaders to rediscover their own national self-interest.