Being a vassal is a thankless task. The United States would not have been able to mount such a ferocious attack on Iran if it had been denied use of British bases. Keir Starmer put his neck on the line to corral his cabinet into agreeing to it. And yet Donald Trump has acted like a dinner guest who complains about the service. While bombing Iran from British runways, the US president has sarcastically dismissed his host as not being “Winston Churchill” and said that he doesn’t need “people who join wars after we’ve already won.”

Trump’s criticisms belie the fact that RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk has been facilitating the US buildup for an attack on Iran since early January. His only grounds for grumbling were that there was a forty-eight-hour delay to Britain serving up RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia, the British base on an island in the Indian Ocean, for use in bombing Iran directly.

In one way, the US president’s attacks have suited Starmer in that they have allowed him, for once, to appear to be on the right side of British public opinion. According to the latest YouGov polling, opposition in the UK to US military action against Iran has jumped 10 points to 59 percent with only 25 percent in favor.

However, any credit Starmer gained initially by ruffling Trump’s feathers soon evaporated as it became apparent that his claim to be permitting the United States to use British bases only for “defensive” purposes was a sham. People did not have to be military experts to realize that he has no way of controlling where the bombers flying from Fairford or Diego Garcia are actually going to drop their cargo.

Even the normally Starmer-aligned Guardian struggled with the concept, saying in an editorial that “if British territory is used for more than defensive strikes in Iran, the Commons should vote.” But how would we know? The left Labour MP, Richard Burgon, has tried to get to the bottom of this by tabling parliamentary questions that ask, “[If] the UK Government will have the ability to approve or refuse individual targets before the US conducts strikes” and then assess them “to ensure that the action is consistent with international law?”

It is, of course, hard to imagine Trump ever conceding that he needs Starmer’s permission each time a bomber takes off from a British base. But this charade is compounded by a much more fundamental problem: permission to use Diego Garcia is not morally or legally even within the UK’s power because it does not have sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago of which the island is part and has yet to ratify a deal to lease it back for military purposes.

Asked for an advisory opinion by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague decided on February 25, 2019, that the UK must end its administration of the archipelago “as soon as possible” because it had unlawfully separated it from Mauritius prior to granting independence in 1968. The ICJ’s forty-four-page opinion — approved by a 13 –1 vote, with only one US judge dissenting — noted that the whole of Mauritius, including the Chagos islands, had been treated as a single “non-self-governing territory” since the UK had acquired it from France under the Treaty of Paris in 1814.

Having given “heightened scrutiny” to the issue of consent, which is crucial when there is a power imbalance between colonizer and colonized, the ICJ said that the detachment of the archipelago from Mauritius “was not based on the free and genuine expression of the will of the people concerned.”

On May 22, 2019, the UN General Assembly welcomed the ICJ’s decision and told the UK to “unconditionally withdraw its colonial administration from [the Chagos islands] within six months.” The UN concluded that the UK’s administration of the archipelago since 1968 has constituted “a wrongful act” and that it should “cooperate with Mauritius to facilitate the resettlement of Mauritian nationals” in the archipelago, including those of Chagossian origin who had been forcibly removed in the 1970s and 1980s.

These crystal clear ICJ and UN decisions are the reason why, dragging their feet, the previous and current UK governments have had to negotiate an agreement with Mauritius. Signed last May, the deal restores Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos islands while allowing the UK to lease back Diego Garcia for a period of ninety-nine years. The UK will not ratify it, however, until its agreement with the United States on the operation of the military base has been updated.

Cue Trump. In January, the president called the deal “a great act of stupidity.” After discussing it on a call with Starmer on February 4, he switched to saying it was “the best he could make” but threatened military action against anyone “who endangers US operations” if it “ever falls apart.” Two weeks later, he made a U-turn again with an epistle on Truth Social saying that if this land is “taken away from the UK . . . it will be a blight on our Great Ally,” which should “remain strong in the face of Wokeism.”

Ever pleased to echo Trump, Nigel Farage, the leader of the far-right Reform party, joined the fray, calling the deal a “sellout” and falsely claiming it would give Mauritius “veto power over US-UK use of Diego Garcia.” Apart from the fact that having a ninety-nine-year lease actually puts the base on a stronger legal footing, the idea that Mauritius — with a population of 1.3 million and one of the poorest countries in the world — could challenge the might of the United States is obviously preposterous.

Many Mauritians would no doubt be happy to see the base closed, but the deal does at least reverse the injustice of the archipelago being wrongfully retained by the UK in the 1960s and will provide Mauritius with some precious revenue in years to come.

For the British and American people, however, there is the different question of whether or not we want our countries to have a military base in the Indian Ocean at all. Diego Garcia is tainted not only by its illegal occupation by Britain and the displacement of those living there but it is also discredited by its central role in decades of regime-change wars and its use as a staging post for people being “rendered” through the base to be detained at Guantanamo Bay.

In 2008, the then–UK foreign secretary, David Miliband, said that the United States had admitted to using Diego Garcia for its post-2001 rendition of alleged terrorists, despite earlier denials. Michael Hayden, the CIA director at the time, claimed that an “error in the US records search” was to blame for the failure to supply accurate information in the first place but insisted that only two flights had stopped to refuel.

Seven years later, however, Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to the former US secretary of state Colin Powell, told Vice News that the island was known to have been used for the US government’s “nefarious activities” when other sites were too full. He said he had learned this after leaving office from four senior intelligence sources who had indicated that the base was home to “a transit site where people were temporarily housed, let us say, and interrogated from time to time.”

Diego Gracia had first come into its own in the 1991 Gulf War as what the international policy think tank Chatham House calls “a critical, high volume launchpad for US air operations.” In 2003, the United States built hangars at the base for up to six B-2 bombers — a third of the US fleet — which allowed it to conduct missions directly from the island over Iraq and Afghanistan. The B-2s’ manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, boasts that it is “the only aircraft to combine long-range, stealth and a heavy payload on a single platform” and that it still holds the record for “the longest air combat mission in history” for being airborne for forty-four hours in Afghan airspace.

We are now seeing history repeat itself with US B-2s dropping 2,000-pound bombs on Iran that send a pressure wave that kills or ruptures the organs of anyone within to 400-meter radius. To put it politely, it stretches credulity to suggest that a bomb with such destructive power can ever be defensive. But, even if that was plausible, there is no way the UK government can realistically ensure that every target on every mission falls into its definition of “defensive,” which is a questionable concept in itself.

Given the history of Diego Garcia military use exclusively as a forward base for regime-change wars, why would a UK government committed to having no part in such wars want to retain it? In the 1960s, the UK government under Harold Wilson declared its intention to withdraw from East of Suez, a process accelerated by the National Liberation Front in Yemen gaining control of Aden in November 1967 and triggering an ignominious evacuation of 3,500 British troops. Tony Blair and succeeding prime ministers have reversed that decision and increased the UK’s military presence in the Gulf, where Oman is now one of the country’s six key military “hubs” overseas.

Such is the antiwar mood now in the UK that even Farage’s Reform UK has begun to retreat from giving Trump’s war a blank check. Farage was quick to criticize Starmer for not immediately allowing the United States to use British bases, but the party’s shadow chancellor, Robert Jenrick, has now reverted to the rhetoric of Trump before he became president, saying “The liberal interventionists of the early twenty-first century failed our own people” and that Reform opposes “drawn out wars in faraway places.”

The duplicity of Reform stands in stark contrast to the consistency of the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has vigorously opposed regime-change wars and has now tabled legislation — backed by twenty-five independent, Labour, and Plaid Cymru MPs — requiring parliamentary approval for the use of UK military bases. Meanwhile, asked about the Diego Garcia deal, Green Party’s leader Zack Polanski is arguing that the UK needs to “disentangle from the United States and that includes a review of US bases.”