Chagos bill in Parliament today. Here’s a reminder of some its flaws…

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https://twitter.com/blagden_david/status/1924781115350380915

1. It costs a fortune

Notions of a Euro-NATO security guarantee for Ukraine face at least three major challenges, even notwithstanding the difficulty of generating such a commitment in the first place. Doesn’t mean they’re insurmountable…but they’d need addressing.

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https://twitter.com/haynesdeborah/status/1890395583115902992

1. Such a guarantee requires adversaries to assess that the guarantors are resolved to fight on their ally’s behalf. But NATO states have spent 3 years demonstrating that they aren’t willing to fight on Ukraine’s behalf. So, there’s a credibility problem from the outset.

Another flurry of Chagos incredulity on here, yet with some from the left asking ‘does anyone really care?’ or ‘will it actually cut through outside Twitter?’

Well - irrespective of whether it cuts through off Twitter - here are a few left-leaning problems with the deal.

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https://twitter.com/blagden_david/status/1879485395630714939

1. It’s not actually decolonisation. It’s giving the Chagossian homeland to a different imperial power that never previously governed the islands, and which has - at least in recent years - treated the Chagossians worse than the UK.

This is why HM Govt’s enthusiasm for this deal is so baffling: you don’t have to be right-wing to dislike it.

It basically only satisfies the following constituencies: … 1/7

https://twitter.com/nicholastyrone/status/1879438474023227657

- FCDO, NGO, and lawyer types who think it’s Terribly Important that the UK obey an ICJ opinion, (a) on principle and (b) because that will encourage others to obey international law (despite all evidence to the contrary, including from the US*, i.e. the base’s main occupant).

Lessons here for all sides. Conservative nostalgists who imagined “reinvigorating” the Commonwealth post-Brexit need to recognise that it’s just an assemblage of graspingly self-interested states, like any other such bloc, not a ‘family’.

And…

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bbc.com/news/articles/… …liberal idealists who hope that pursuing “soft power” or deferring to an imagined “rules-based liberal order” will make others like the UK need to recognise that no amount of fawning will change their interests. Instead, they’ll just infer you’re irresolute and shake you down.

A big win for Mauritius: not only will the UK pay Port Louis for ‘taking back’ an archipelago it’d never held sovereignty* over, but they’ll now be able to extract lots of juicy Chinese aid in exchange for complicating** US/UK use of Diego Garcia…

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gov.uk/government/new… * Unless you count the Chagos Islands being administered from the nearest French and then British imperial authorities, which happened to be in a larger island 1,300 miles away, up to the point of Mauritian independence.

On the UK Strategic Defence Review’s ‘External Reviewer’ model…

Heartened by @FTusa284’s optimism, but there are two key risks to this approach that need mitigating:
1. The peril of groupthink, and
2. The very notion of outsourced ‘Reviewers’

To tackle the latter first…
1/23

https://twitter.com/ftusa284/status/1820509728591512033

An SDR must tackle fundamental political questions: about what society construes as a threat, what we want to be able to do about it, and how much resource (at the expense of other things) we want to assign to our military ‘insurance policy’.

#SDSR20 observation(s?).. Every SDSR has a pre-Review “phoney war” phase, in which headlines swirl about this or that capability. “Second carrier to be cut” one week, “frigate numbers to fall” the next. It is part of the politics. “Murmur the vulnerability of Sacred Cow X”,...1/? ...”and maybe they’ll offer up Y for cuts instead, or at least cut some fat from Z” (although “fat” usually means letting some infrastructure become ever-more dilapidated, or ever-more actually-quite-important jobs become gapped). One wildcard this time around is Cummings,...2/?