From Svalbard to Antarctica – and even into space – the major powers are jockeying for global reach
by Robert Fox
The Chagos Islands, midway in the Indian Ocean between the coast of Tanzania and the Indonesia archipelag,o is a place of legend and dark tales, and downright skullduggery in human rights and international power politics.
A former British colonial governor referred to Diego Garcia, the principal island home to the British-American strategic base, as “fantasy island”. A US commander termed the kidney-shaped atoll “the footprint of freedom”.
There is something of Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island rewritten for the Tik Tok age about the whole story. Discovered by Europeans around 1512, the island of Diego Garcia became a main strategic base for the British and Americans in 1971.
In the process the remaining 2,000 native Chagossians were removed – most to Mauritius.
Diego Garcia is one of more than a dozen strategic outposts deemed vital to global security by contesting alliances. The main contestants are the team of the United States and Nato, and against them Russia and China and their allliances like Brics, CSTO for Russia and the Shanghai Conference.
These outposts underscore the chronic condition of no war/no peace that pervades global politics today. They are clear indicators of the tensions of our own times and point to a new range of challenges and potential conflict in the near future – particularly in the realms of submarine warfare, cyber and space.
Diego Garcia and the Chagos have been in British hands since 1814. In 2019 the International Criminal Court said British administration was illegal and against the UN’s decolonising conventions – and this was endorsed by the UN General Assembly.
The Starmer Government negotiated a deal for the Chagossians to return and the islands to be administered by Mauritius – the adopted home for many, a thousand miles away across the Pacific.
But, this December, the newly elected prime minister of Mauritius, Dr Navin Ramgoolam, rejected the deal as “not good enough” for his government and people, and the Chagossians.
The Chagos issue divides allies as well as challenges foes. Donald Trump hates the deal anyway – the 99-year lease agreed for the Anglo-American base was insufficient for him.
The Treasure Island story for Tik Tok has become the nightmare before Christmas for Starmer’s lawyerly-fixated team.
For Americans, Diego Garcia is vital to their global strategy. It has the long runway to launch B-52 bombers, as happened in the Iraq wars and the campaign against Bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11.
It is likely that it was used for the extrajudicial rendition of al Qaeda prisoners – in the words of one official working for Secretary of State Colin Powell: “The CIA did nefarious things there.”
Britain illegally detained Tamil asylum seekers there, as well as forcibly removing the native and migrant worker populations.
The Americans will rely on Diego Garcia not so much as a base for the long-range and soon to be obsolete B-52, but for the link it provides across the world, with islands like Guam in the Marianas in the eastern Pacific, and Ascension, also shared with the British, in the Atlantic; and this proved vital for the British recapture of the Falklands in 1982.
They are needed for supporting the growing strategic submarine contest with China and Russia, for tracking the new breed of intercontinental hypersonic missiles, and the increasing weaponisation of space.
Russia, too, has strategic outposts – several of them increasingly beleaguered. The Russians are trying to hang on to their Syrian coastal bases at Latakia, with its airbase at Hmeimim, and Tartus, following the fall of the House of Assad. Tartus is needed to support the new base at Benghazi in Libya and Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
Another sensitive outpost is Kaliningrad, on an enclave between Lithuania and Poland, a vital marine and missile base,and listening post on the Baltic – which Moscow sees as Nato’s lake.
In its claim to be a global maritime power, dominating the Arctic route from China to Europe has become the keystone to Russia’s stance as a global naval power. This makes the Kola Peninsula and the Murmansk bases predominant.
Looking on from the north-west is Svalbard, one of the most exotic of all strategic outposts. Formerly Spitzbergen, it has been used briefly by Norway for overt military purposes. Today its protection falls to the Norwegian Coastguard. It is a strategic crowsnest for Nato – a lookout for threats from the sea and under it, the air and space.
It grows in importance as warfare moves from the conventional three dimensions of land, sea, and air, to six and possibly seven dimensions, with the additions of space, cyber, information and AI, and, very likely, quantum.
Svalbard is a key feature in the strategic contest in the Arctic regions on earth and in space. Britain is involved as leader of the alliance of ten northern nations in the Joint Expeditionary Force of Nato. But it also needs to look to its interests in the South Atlantic and Antarctica. Here there is a synergy between the growing global maritime standoff, and in the standoff developing in space.
Antarctica is governed by the Antarctic Treaty of 1961, which has ensured that the White Continent is for peaceful purposes and should not be militarised. In February this year China announced the opening of Qinling, its fifth station in Antarctica, for scientific research. Beijing says it conforms to the Antarctic Treaty norms, but military analysts identify it is a major tracking and guidance facility for satellites and weapons in space.
(The I Paper)