As for the Chagos islands, it's by far the best thing to get rid of them. There's no value at all and a lot of trouble keeping them.
I heard a Hong Kong national argue that that the end of the agreement should have seen Hong Kong go back to Taiwan, not China, because the initial agreement wasn’t made with the CCP and the Taiwanese government is closer to being the natural successor.
I can only begin to imagine the shit storm this would have caused.
In a similar vein, Russia should never have got USSR's UN security council seat.
Now that's an interesting counterfactual. The legal case was weak, and certainly they didn't have to on account of Russia's strength. Other than nukes, which a few non-SC members have, a lot of mostly empty land area and a space programme, Russia's credentials as a superpower aren't great when it's not the same country as Ukraine and central Asia and doesn't also hold sway over Warsaw Pact countries. Not sure China necessarily saw them as a friendly counterweight to the West then either. On the other hand, they had the other CIS states all insisting Russia was the true continuation of the USSR, no objections and they probably thought that it would help Russia become friends. Does the world look vastly different if Russia goes through an application process to rejoin the UN and doesn't get a seat on the Security Council? Perhaps not, but I'm sure Mearsheimer et al would explain that every act of violence Russia undertook afterwards was a natural response to it...
China is currently the largest or 2nd largest buyer of UK Pork.
Although I won't be surprised in 2-3 years time China will use it as leverage. As they did with Denmark.
And it is not that China wants any of these either. UK is currently desperately trying to increase its export ( without success )
If the UK had stuck with Truss, that mightn’t have been true. She was opening up new pork markets.
> Last time I checked, most countries today, aside from Russia, aren't in the business of invading other countries and expanding territory
How about Israel that the UK is arming? Though in the case of the UK it is contracting.
> The UK will be just fine - it's doing as much as any other western country to keep it's relevance.
That's reassuring.
Do you mean:
a) agency
b) influence
c) something else?
Is the idea that Chagossian repatriation now becomes a Mauritian problem? Had the British been taking that problem particularly seriously?
Or more to do with the British not really wanting to be caught between the Americans and increasingly assertive regional powers who may be annoyed by the Americans’ stronghold there?
Again the chagos islands, I know very little about them, but I understand that the islanders themselves hate the deal. And the UK is offering a whole lot of money to keep the military bases they had for free. You can say it was a matter of international law but Mauritius claim to the island is laughable, they are more than 1000 miles away. Also the way the deal was presented as a step away from colonialism etc just feels wrong. Timid apologetics isn't a good way to advance the UKs interest, nor is it helpful for the rest of the world for the UK to be weak and ineffective. Just look at how they helped Ukraine. Again the politicians have no will or national pride to stand up for the UKs interests and it's a shame.
Do we know that? Presumably there were negotiations. Normally both parties in a negotiation start at extreme opposites and make their way somewhere in the middle. Obviously we don’t/won’t know every detail but I don’t know you can say they didn’t try. Simple reality is that the UK wasn’t holding a lot of cards in that negotiation.