The opening lines to the song that catapulted Billie Eilish to fame are, as it happens, an apt description of Communist China’s new play for Diego Garcia, the secretive Indian Ocean atoll that houses a vital British-American naval base. 

Situated between the Maldives and Mauritius, it is one of the two most critical American bomber bases in the Indo-Pacific, with impressive port capacities and an airstrip for warplanes capable of overflying key maritime choke points and distant Chinese bases. An oceanic listening post on the former Soviet Union from the south, Diego Garcia is now on Beijing’s wish list.

Of course, what China might covet it will not necessarily get, and the odds of President Xi pouncing on one of the most remote but strategic American military assets in the world any time soon are slim. Yet the G7’s recent admonishment of Beijing for instigating a “disturbing rise in incidents of economic coercion” that goes hand in hand with military expansionism around the world is more than theoretical. 

Taiwan dominates the headlines, but Beijing is now seeking by stealth a foothold where it never had one: in the Chagos Archipelago, of which Diego Garcia is the largest of the obscure seven-island chain. The reason for this unwanted entrée boils down to what so much else ultimately does in global power struggles: real estate.

America does not actually own the base which houses an estimated 1,700 military personnel and hundreds of civilian contractors, submarine support facilities, a critical radar nexus and even a U.S. Space Operations Command. Washington leases the base from Britain, which wrested Diego Garcia from Napoleon in 1814. 

For decades it was administered from the former British colony of Mauritius, but when that archipelago achieved independence in 1968, the British Indian Ocean Territory also took shape — its raison d’être being the unhindered strategic development of Diego Garcia.

For the moment, what has steadily untangled a delicate international arrangement are not Communist Chinese predations but time. In 2019 the International Court of Justice ruled that the British “occupation” of the Chagos Archipelago was illegal and that ownership should revert to Mauritius. In 2022, when a former British prime minister, Liz Truss, served as foreign secretary, she signaled that Britain would hand over the Chagos islands. 

Fueled in part by the issue of forced displacement of native Chagossian inhabitants in the past,  Mauritius has unsurprisingly been increasingly vocal with respect to reclaiming ownership. Because the Hague’s ruling is an advisory opinion, though, it leaves open a path for a negotiated settlement on the status of Diego Garcia itself. With so much unresolved and at stake, a Tory lawmaker, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, last week called the situation “a strategic mess.”

There is pressure mounting because in the absence of such a settlement, Britain risks yielding the tropical atoll to Mauritius in toto at a time when China is making inroads in the Indo-Pacific with its so-called Belt and Road Initiative. Mauritius has already signed on to that bilateral free trade agreement.

Sino-Mauritians make up one of Mauritius’s four major ethnic communities. According to the Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua, Mauritius has since late last year been the third international clearing center for the renminbi, the Chinese currency, in the African region after South Africa and Zambia. China is Mauritius’s biggest source of imports, and Beijing has in the past few years invested an estimated $1 billion in the country. 

The situation has parallels with Communist Chinese infiltration of aspects of commercial and even civic life in the remote Solomon Islands, the difference being that Diego Garcia is packed to the gills with state-of-the-art American military hardware. If Cyprus with its two vast British bases has been described as the unsinkable aircraft carrier of the Mediterranean, switch out that body of water for the Indian Ocean and the same moniker applies for the strategic 12-square-mile speck that is  Diego Garcia. 

Washington has voiced concerns about any imminent British move that would hand the atoll over to Mauritius without proper consultation and the necessary provisos to ensure security for existing military assets. According to the Daily Mail, the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, has been “tasked” by Downing Street to “assuage the Americans’ worries” and suggested Hong Kong-style option in which Britain could take out a 99-year lease on the islands once sovereignty is formally transferred. 

Although it is unclear whether Port Louis — the capital of Mauritius — would sign on to such an arrangement, there are hints that favorable financial terms could sweeten the deal. Mr. Smith told the Daily Mail that “the U.K., along with the USA, has to bring Mauritius on side with us, not with China,” adding that “they have got to come up with another agreement … which will be more expensive but strategically critical.”

It would be startling if in its quest to dislodge America as the preeminent power in the Indo-Pacific, Communist China were to succeed in building a base if not on Diego Garcia itself, then right at its doorstep. As Beijing has demonstrated in the South China Sea with its so-called Great Wall of Sand, it is adept at militarizing mere sandbars, and the Chagos Archipelago has more than a few. 

It is  worth recalling that on the Horn of Africa, little Djibouti has a trio of important military bases, one which belongs to the former colonial power, France, and another to America. The third and most recent is the $600 million People’s Liberation Army Support Base, which is under the firm control of Beijing.