Small Wars Journal

UN Fires a Shot at America's ‘Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier’ (Diego Garcia)

Mon, 05/27/2019 - 6:01am

UN Fires a Shot at America's ‘Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier’ (Diego Garcia) by Tobin Harshaw – Bloomberg

What does one of the world’s largest marine sanctuaries have to do with U.S. national security? Quite a lot, actually: The island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Archipelago, lying just south of the equator and 2,000 miles east of Africa, hosts arguably the most important U.S. military base for U.S. operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan. And you don’t have to climb the yardarms to see trouble on the horizon.

This week the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to force the U.K., which colonized the islands during the Napoleonic wars and now controls them as a British Indian Ocean Territory, to return them to Mauritius, which achieved independence from Britain in the mid-1960s…

Read on.