This is John Batchster, a conversation with colleague Mary Kissel, formerly a senior advisor to the Secretary of State about the Chagos Islands, that Prime Minister Starmor intends to hand to Mauritius that never had anything to do with the Chagos Islands.

Mauritius, of course, is heavily influenced by the People's Republic of China, as Mary makes the case.

And it's an ill-considered plan.

President Trump has now spoken out against the plan.

What is to be done?

Mr. Starmour is not listening, question mark.

More of this tonight.

Well, it's just an unnecessary, very damaging decision by Starmer to proceed with this

course of action.

You know, ironically, John, the U.S. State Department greenlighted the deal last year,

which tells you two things.

Number one, Secretary of State Rubio either got some very bad

advice or two, there are so few political appointees there who know anything about Asia Pacific

that they either ignored the deal or they let the career staff greenlight it because this is an

action that the career staff at the State Department would probably support.

So I was glad to see President Trump change his mind, come out and denounce the idea.

We need Diego Garcia to project power into the Indian Ocean and up to Asia Pacific and west

over Africa and up into the Middle East.

It's an incredibly important outpost.

And remember, too, that this is also symbolic of the fact that U.S. power is also dependent

on our good relationship with allies. We can't solve every

problem by ourselves. And here, we need the cooperation of Britain not to return these islands

...