The land, on the northern finish of Guam, a US territory within the western Pacific, has been in Flores’s household for 5 generations. Her grandfather’s household fished, hunted, and made a residing farming coconuts and elevating pigs on it. However the navy took the farmland in a land seize after World Battle II and left the remaining sandwiched between two federal properties. To the instant south is Andersen Air Pressure Base, the one base within the area in a position to service the US’ heaviest bombers. To the north is a wildlife refuge—land the Division of Protection handed over to the US Fish and Wildlife Service as a substitute of to the households from whom it was stolen. There isn’t a entrance to Flores’s household’s land on the refuge aspect, so they have to entry it by the bottom.
The association is “cumbersome, dehumanizing, demoralizing,” Flores informed me. It’s a part of why she and her fellow Indigenous dissenters use a specific phrase to characterize the US navy presence: “occupation.”
In contrast to Flores’s household, others throughout the 212-square-mile island had their land totally seized by the Pentagon, by no means to be returned. The navy took properties, farms, and ranches to create the 23-square-mile Air Pressure base, the three,000-acre telecommunications website immediately south of it, and a 2,000-acre addition to the bottom. To construct {a magazine} to retailer heavy naval munitions, the navy annexed 28 sq. miles of Guam’s southern inland, together with household properties and what’s now the island’s largest reservoir. And to assemble a sprawling shipyard and the primary services for a US naval base, the navy uprooted a complete village that had been bombed throughout World Battle II and moved its residents to the muddy inland hills.
Since World Battle II, the US navy has occupied between a 3rd and a half of Guam’s land. Building and coaching have destroyed ancestral websites of its Indigenous folks, the CHamorus, and broken a lot of the island’s aquatic and wooded ecosystems. Many years of navy dumping, spills, and herbicide use have left Guam riddled with poisonous websites, a lot of which have but to be cleaned.
The Pentagon’s curiosity in Guam stems from its strategic location: Lower than 2,000 miles from Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, and Manila, Guam and the close by Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands are by a large margin the US territories closest to East and Southeast Asia. For a lot of the previous century, the navy has used Guam as a hub for its operations within the area, incomes it the moniker “the tip of the spear.”
Now, with US international coverage posturing extra aggressively towards China, the Division of Protection is sharpening its spear; and massively growing its forces and services on Guam.
The buildup, principally in its development section after greater than a decade of contentious planning, will relocate about 5,000 Marines to Guam. To accommodate them, the navy is razing hundreds of acres of Guam’s northern forests—house to distinctive and fragile ecosystems, the island’s important supply of consuming water, and numerous CHamoru burial and cultural websites—to construct housing, a live-fire coaching vary advanced, a hand grenade vary, and different coaching services. The navy can also be developing an Military missile protection system and an plane service berthing station, which can destroy dozens of acres of coral reef. On the Northern Mariana Islands, it hopes to construct an airfield, coaching websites, and a bombing vary.
I just lately traveled to Guam to spend time with a few of the grassroots activists who’re resisting the navy buildup. Whereas they’ve had important wins through the years, they’re restricted by their standing as colonial topics, and up to now their advocacy has principally been steamrolled by navy forms. They concern that the rising militarization will additional devastate the island’s surroundings and their ancestral websites and practices and should even, sometime, make their house unlivable.
“There’s a lot at stake,” Flores stated. “It’s our water, it’s our fundamental human rights, it’s our medicines and our meals and our methods of life.”
“We’re the collateral harm of empire,” she added. “And empire is betting on us being exhausted.”
Before it was the tip of the spear, Guam was the “USS Guam.” The nickname, utilized by the Navy, describes the interval of naval governorship on the island, which started in 1898 when the US acquired Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico in the course of the Spanish-American Battle. “The Navy commander is the captain of the ship of Guam; he mainly has management over all the island the best way he has management over a ship,” defined Michael Bevacqua, a CHamoru activist and professor and the curator of the Guam Museum.
In 1901, the US Supreme Court docket legalized the Navy’s authority over Guam. In choices often known as the Insular Instances, the courtroom dominated that the US Structure isn’t totally relevant on “unincorporated territories” like Guam, permitting naval governors to implement a harsh colonial program. Amongst different abuses, naval administrations codified racial segregation, compelled CHamorus to talk English as a substitute of their native language, and imposed heavy taxes that usually resulted within the navy seizing household lands.
The naval administrations continued till December 1941, when the Japanese navy attacked Hawaii, Guam, and half a dozen different US and British colonies. US forces stood little likelihood on Guam, and its island chain, often known as the Marianas, turned Japanese outposts, ushering in one of many darkest occasions in CHamoru historical past. The Japanese navy marched hundreds of residents to compelled labor camps and tortured hundreds extra. It applied an assimilation program, forcing the CHamorus to undertake the tradition of their third occupier in lower than half a century. Because the US regrouped its Pacific forces and commenced encroaching on the islands, executions of CHamorus, together with beheadings, turned widespread.
The US navy took the Marianas in 1944, with a bloody invasion that killed an estimated 70,000 folks. Virtually instantly, the US made Guam a naval and logistics hub.
In 1950, in response to mounting stress from CHamoru teams, Congress handed the Natural Act of Guam, which eliminated the naval governorship, granted residents US citizenship, and redesignated the island as an unincorporated territory of the US. Guam would go on to function an important logistics heart for US wars in Korea and Southeast Asia, incomes it new nicknames: “the grocery store of the Pacific” and “the world’s largest gasoline station.”
Regardless of the territory’s usefulness to numerous warfare efforts, it was not a fascinating deployment for navy personnel. “Guam is efficacious, however it’s not diplomatically vital,” so bold officers noticed it as a nothing task, Bevacqua defined. For enlisted males, “it’s not American sufficient…however it additionally by no means had that unique dimension that different abroad bases had, so coming to Guam sucked.” With the dreary status got here one other nickname: “the trailer park of the Pacific.”
It took the top of the Chilly Battle for the navy to talk of Guam in favorable phrases once more. A federal Base Realignment and Closure initiative within the Nineties referred to as for a drawdown of US navy services overseas; on the similar time, US allies that host bases, significantly in Asia, started demanding troop reductions. However hawks like then–Secretary of Protection Dick Cheney had plans to interchange one chilly warfare with one other. They began in search of methods to maintain sufficient firepower within the area to confront China.
Over the subsequent decade, the Protection Division’s posturing in Asia was torn between the “realignment” mandate and the hawks’ unwillingness to demilitarize. And in Guam, the Pentagon discovered its answer. It was as if the navy rediscovered why it had conquered the island within the first place: “On the lookout for a Pleasant Abroad Base, Pentagon Finds It Already Has One,” said a 2004 New York Instances headline. The island turned the Pacific obsession of Cheney’s mentor and eventual successor, Donald Rumsfeld.
The navy finally determined to make use of Guam to relocate Marines from Okinawa, a colonized Japanese prefecture that hosts greater than 30 US navy websites regardless of being solely double the dimensions of Guam. For years, Okinawans had been constructing a resistance motion to protest the accidents, environmental destruction, and harassment they routinely endured by the hands of the US navy.
From 2005 to 2009, the Bush and Obama administrations signed a collection of agreements with the Japanese authorities, setting in movement the buildup on Guam. However the CHamorus had a resistance motion of their very own.
Angela Santos sat in her jeep, stopped within the turning lane of a freeway in northern Guam. From the motive force’s aspect, she seemed by a barbed-wire-topped fence into a gap in a tree line—as shut as she might comfortably get to her household land, which had been seized by the navy earlier than she was born and is now slated to change into a part of a sprawling city fight coaching facility. The final individual from her household to enter the land was her late brother, Angel—broadly thought-about a father of CHamoru resistance—when he occupied it in protest almost 30 years in the past.
In 1990, whereas working as a clerk at Andersen Air Pressure Base, Angel Santos got here throughout a confidential report that detailed how, from 1978 to 1986, the Division of Protection had examined the consuming water on the base and located dangerously elevated ranges of trichloroethylene, a cleansing and degreasing solvent. Extended publicity to TCE could cause kidney most cancers and is linked to a number of different illnesses, together with liver most cancers.
Three years earlier, Santos’s 2-year-old daughter, Francine, had died after medical doctors discovered a baseball-size tumor between her kidney and liver. There was no option to show that TCE publicity had prompted her loss of life, however after studying the report, Santos discovered it exhausting to keep away from connecting the dots: He and his household had been residing on the bottom throughout Francine’s brief life.
The navy hadn’t launched any details about the TCE within the water. And it wasn’t simply navy personnel who might be affected by it. The northern half of the island, the place the bottom is situated, is roofed in porous limestone, and underneath that’s the Northern Lens Aquifer, which provides some 80 % of Guam’s consuming water. No matter was contaminating the bottom’s water was doubtless additionally operating out of the faucets in folks’s properties.
TCE wasn’t the one toxin the navy had launched to Guam. Throughout and shortly after World Battle II, troops disposed of previous tools, used chemical drums, and even unexploded bombs by tossing them over cliffs, protecting them with filth, or burning them with napalm; the refuse leached heavy metals and different contaminants that remained detectable at noxious ranges for many years.
Later, within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, the navy sprayed the identical chemical compounds used to make Agent Orange—the herbicide with which US forces poisoned generations in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—to clear fence strains and a pipeline.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, a federal company inspected how Andersen and the Navy base have been storing roughly 160 tons of annual poisonous waste and located “repetitive” violations “of a critical nature.” Chemical compounds had doubtless seeped into the aquifer. Andersen was later declared a Superfund website.
A decade later, the Navy discovered that certainly one of its energy crops had been leaking polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, right into a swamp and a river. Residents of the realm have since reported excessive most cancers charges.
There’s remarkably little info on how navy air pollution has affected public well being on Guam—although anecdotes and obtainable numbers present trigger for alarm. Knowledge from the Most cancers Analysis Heart on the College of Guam present most cancers charges growing roughly 20 % over each five-year interval between 1998 and 2012. And a College of Guam research reveals that the speed of deaths from most cancers on the island greater than doubled between the Nineteen Seventies and 2000s. In a single village, PCB contamination from a catastrophe at a close-by Coast Guard facility corresponded to a spike in most cancers deaths over the subsequent three a long time.
For Angel Santos, the revelation that the navy had been silently contaminating Guam’s aquifer was a defining second. Till that time, he’d been a patriotic navy man: He’d joined the Air Pressure at 18 and served for 13 years. However he shortly turned Guam’s anti-occupation chief. With different activists, he based Nasion Chamoru—CHamoru Nation—which staged direct motion protests all through the Nineties. His speeches on the connection between colonialism, militarism, capitalism, and racism, in addition to tales and movies of Nasion Chamoru members hopping base fences and getting violently arrested, sparked conversations amongst residents. Santos additionally served three phrases within the Guam legislature; earlier than his loss of life in 2003 on the age of 44. (The official trigger was Parkinson’s illness, however given the enemies he made, rumors of foul play flow into to today.)
Naturally, Santos’s antagonism didn’t sit nicely with everybody on Guam. He angered these within the halls of energy. In 2000, he spent six months in federal jail—the utmost sentence—for defying a courtroom order to remain off federal land. However he additionally upset many odd CHamorus, for whom his activism was an unwelcome disruption within the island’s advanced politics of deference to the navy.
Activists on Guam describe this politics in largely the identical manner: CHamorus are pulled in two instructions—and they’re distributed pretty evenly throughout the ensuing spectrum.
On the one hand, many CHamorus see their relationship with the US as an abusive one. As Bevacqua defined, even CHamorus within the navy expertise the grievances of colonialism. Whether or not it’s their incapability to talk their native language, their lack of ancestral land, the straightforward incontrovertible fact that they haven’t any voting illustration in Congress, or one thing else that brings it to the fore, “each CHamoru has an activist within them,” Bevacqua stated.
Alternatively, CHamorus really feel the still-palpable trauma handed down from the period of Japanese occupation. The USA’ retaking of Guam throughout World Battle II is the point of interest within the modern telling of the island’s historical past: Each July, there are giant festivities to rejoice Liberation Day (which activists have tried to recast as Reoccupation Day). “The kind of patriotism that many CHamorus really feel immediately is born in these seeds,” Bevacqua famous;. That patriotism, plus the promise of financial stability, leads Guam to have the next fee of navy enlistment than any US state.
“By way of their understanding of their relationship to the US, it’s caught there,” Bevacqua stated. “It’s why some folks say, ‘Now we have to assist the navy’—due to what they did in World Battle II.”
When I requested Catherine Castro and Phillip Santos concerning the navy buildup, they spoke at size concerning the Japanese occupation. Most individuals residing on Guam immediately “don’t know what it smells prefer to be dominated by another person,” stated Santos (no; relation to Angel Santos; many individuals on Guam have the identical surnames).
I sat down with them at one finish of an extended boardroom desk within the clear, carpeted places of work of the Guam Chamber of Commerce. Because the chamber’s president and the armed forces committee chair, respectively, Castro (who is just not CHamoru) and Santos (who’s) are two of probably the most outstanding native voices in favor of the buildup. In the course of the Base Realignment and Closure initiative within the Nineties, the chamber welcomed the Pentagon’s renewed curiosity in Guam. And as activists have grilled the navy on its plans and portrayed the Division of Protection as an occupying energy, the chamber has urged unity and preached the advantages of additional militarization—significantly the financial advantages.
“We need to have good-paying jobs for our folks, and having an expanded navy presence on Guam would assist that,” Castro stated.
Once I pressed them for specifics concerning the financial advantages, Castro and Santos pointed me to a Guam Division of Labor economist, who estimated that roughly 1,500 everlasting Guam residents are at the moment engaged on navy development tasks and that the buildup has up to now introduced in about $200 million in further tax income. The economist additionally despatched a spreadsheet indicating that, since 2015, the 12 months the plans for the buildup have been principally finalized, the Protection Division has awarded $740 million in contracts to Guam companies and $790 million to off-island firms for work on Guam. It’s exhausting to find out how a lot of that cash will go to Guam residents; Castro and Santos talked about that that they had been lobbying Washington to grant extra non permanent laborer visas as a result of Guam doesn’t have almost sufficient “expert” employees. Contractors have stated that the buildup might require 4,000 to six,000 further employees from overseas by 2023.
I requested Castro and Santos for his or her impression of the activists’ considerations—particularly the environmental ones. “The navy has carried out a very, actually good job of being financial… I’m sorry, environmental stewards of the realm,” Castro replied. “I’m actually unhappy to say that our personal native inhabitants, we have to do a greater job,” she added, happening to complain about litter and deserted automobiles alongside the edges of village roads. She asserted that the activists who routinely elevate environmental considerations are doubtless appearing on “rumour,” “not perhaps having learn” the paperwork the navy printed to justify its tasks.
“When you have a look at the environmental impression research which were performed in these areas, you will see that what you’re in search of,” Castro stated.
“It was like a ten,000-page doc, and so they gave us 90 days to learn it,” stated Melvin Received Pat-Borja, describing the primary draft of the environmental impression assertion, or EIS, on the buildup that the navy printed in 2009.
Environmental impression statements are closely researched paperwork mandated by the Nationwide Environmental Coverage Act for sure development tasks. They’re meant to compel businesses to think about environmental well being earlier than embarking on giant developments. EIS legislation additionally mandates a remark course of by which the general public can request info or convey up points which will in any other case be missed. For a lot of tasks, together with the navy buildup, authorities businesses deal with the EIS course of as the primary and even sole avenue of public session.
When the Pentagon printed the draft EIS, it was instantly clear to many on Guam that the navy was attempting to slide one previous their group. It was stuffed with jargon and technical research, and the navy initially gave them solely 45 days—the minimal required—to touch upon it. “Let’s put collectively this large doc that these illiterate CHamorus gained’t learn, let’s give them a small window to reply, and after they don’t reply, we’re going to show round and say, ‘Nicely, we consulted you, and no one had something to say,’” stated Received Pat-Borja, who was a public college instructor and poetry teacher on the time.
To many, the best way the navy dealt with the EIS course of echoed the prevailing dynamic between the US and Guam: “We exist in a relationship that’s based mostly on session and never consent,” Received Pat-Borja stated.
Decided to guard their island; from unchecked militarism, Received Pat-Borja and a gaggle of activist-minded CHamorus succeeded in successful an extension on; the general public remark interval, then divvied up the draft EIS and set to work. “We didn’t have a reputation; we have been simply folks form of assembly and studying,” stated Leevin Camacho, then a lawyer in non-public apply. They examine how the navy deliberate to herald 8,600 Marines and construct an plane service berthing station, a Marine base, and coaching services. They examine how, at their peak, development actions would add 79,000 residents to an island of roughly 160,000 folks and the way the elevated navy presence would suck almost 6 million further gallons of water out of the aquifer day by day.
Whereas digging into the doc, the activists determined to mobilize. They adopted a reputation, We Are Guåhan, utilizing the CHamoru phrase for Guam, and launched a marketing campaign that referred to as on the group to submit feedback. When the general public remark interval was over, residents had submitted over 10,000, from deeply researched technical inquiries to basic statements of disapproval—every of which the navy was required to handle.
Of explicit concern to We Are Guåhan and Guam residents was the navy’s plan to assemble live-fire coaching ranges. The navy indicated that it deliberate to construct the ranges close to the stays of an historic CHamoru village often known as Pågat. The picture of .50-caliber machine weapons firing over a sacred website spurred folks to protest. Using that power, We Are Guåhan and others sued the navy, alleging that it didn’t correctly take into account alternate options for the live-fire ranges.
In 2012, the US authorities introduced plans for a extra modest buildup. It will scale back the variety of Marines relocating to Guam to five,000 and undergo a brand new “supplemental” EIS course of that might element barely trimmed tasks and put forth an extended time line for implementing them. The next 12 months, the navy stated Pågat was not its best choice for the live-fire coaching vary advanced. The State Division cited an “more and more unsure safety surroundings” and the necessity to “maximize the operational capability” of Pacific forces. However many Guam residents consider their activism performed a big function within the adjustments. Given the facility differentials, activists thought-about it an enormous win—however they knew the victory was solely partial.
The Pentagon’s new plan comes with a contemporary set of threats. Along with lowering the scope of the buildup, the navy determined to relocate the live-fire coaching vary advanced to the northern tip of the island, close to the wildlife refuge in an space often known as Ritidian.
For development of the Ritidian advanced and the Marine base, the navy has begun bulldozing round 1,000 acres of Guam’s northern limestone forest. For millennia, CHamorus have used the plant species that reside within the focused forest tracts for meals, drugs, and religious practices. The navy has dedicated to replanting sure species in an try to protect the horticulture of the destroyed forest areas, however in line with Frances Meno, a third-generation CHamoru healer, it’s almost inconceivable to maintain a lot of these crops alive exterior of their wild habitat. She has tried to domesticate herbs for her work, however they not often reside for various years in a backyard surroundings, she stated. Latest organic work backs up her expertise: A College of Guam research discovered that an endangered cycad species planted in its pure surroundings had a 70 to 100% survival fee after 15 years, in contrast with 10 % when planted in restoration websites with disturbed soil—the strategy the navy has taken with a lot of what it calls its “mitigation” efforts.
With the development underway, Meno has already had confrontations with navy safety whereas attempting to gather her herbs. “If the navy retains clearing our jungle,” she informed me, “there isn’t any level for us to be healers.”
To account for stray rounds, the navy should set up a “hazard zone” for the Ritidian advanced—that’s, an space exterior of the ranges within the course of fireside that’s clear of individuals after they’re in use. And to restrict its land use, the navy positioned the advanced in order that a lot of its hazard zone is offshore. That specific part of ocean, nevertheless, is certainly one of Guam’s hottest fishing areas. When the ranges are full, these waters shall be closed for as a lot as 75 % of the 12 months.
“I grew up right here, and I’ve been fishing right here since I used to be 6 years previous,” fisherman Mike James stated. “The navy is vital, but additionally, we’re vital.”
Because the threats to Guam multiply, resistance has ramped up. Members of We Are Guåhan and different dissidents have begun infiltrating the island’s halls of energy and tradition. Received Pat-Borja, the schoolteacher, is now head of Guam’s Fee on Decolonization, a authorities company that’s pushing to alter Guam’s political relationship with the US. Bevacqua was additionally a part of We Are Guåhan; along with his work as a historian and an educator, he has change into a frontrunner within the CHamoru language revitalization motion. Others turned the heads of publishing homes, outstanding social employees, high-profile attorneys, and writers.
Camacho, the non-public apply lawyer, was elected lawyer basic of Guam in 2018. His workplace is suing the navy to pressure it to assist pay for the cleanup of an previous Navy-built landfill that has been leaching poisonous runoff. He informed me he hopes to determine an environmental litigation part within the lawyer basic’s workplace to file extra such circumstances.
A brand new wave of activists has taken We Are Guåhan’s place on the grassroots—probably the most lively of those teams is Prutehi Litekyan, CHamoru for “Save Ritidian.” Within the spirit of We Are Guåhan, Prutehi Litekyan has adopted some research-heavy techniques, confronting the navy by itself extremely technical turf. One of many group’s present campaigns invokes a 2012 Environmental Safety Company research that confirmed that firing vary trainings often end in poisonous heavy metallic residue, which might seep into groundwater. The navy didn’t embody the research in any of its EISs.
“There are nonetheless remnants of warfare right here, nonetheless contamination,” stated Jessica Nangauta, a Prutehi Litekyan organizer. “Why would we need to settle for extra?”
Prutehi Litekyan has additionally taken its combat worldwide. With the assistance of a Guam-based legislation agency (headed by Julian Aguon, one other We Are Guåhan organizer), it filed a grievance to the United Nations Particular Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; in response, three UN particular rapporteurs despatched a letter earlier this 12 months to the US authorities expressing considerations about human and civil rights violations towards CHamorus, opening the door for additional motion on the worldwide stage.
Regionally, Prutehi Litekyan has organized protests, disrupted conferences between navy officers and native leaders, and even acquired two of its members elected to the Guam legislature in 2019. The group has additionally taken to grilling different public officers it sees as too deferential to the navy—like Patrick Lujan, head of Guam’s State Historic Preservation Workplace, the company accountable for coordinating with the navy to safeguard the human stays and archaeological websites it uncovers throughout development. The activists have charged that Lujan doesn’t inform the general public shortly sufficient about finds and that he permits the navy to resolve how CHamoru ancestors and artifacts are revered. They surmise that this partly stems from a battle of curiosity, as Lujan is within the navy himself; he needed to miss latest negotiations over the navy’s historic preservation procedures as a result of he was out on lively responsibility with the Air Pressure Reserve.
As a territorial official, nevertheless, Lujan has no management over the navy, which strong-arms his oversight in lots of the similar methods it does resident activism. In an August memo I obtained by way of a public information request, an Air Pressure engineer reminded Lujan a number of occasions that, although the navy should seek the advice of him on sure issues, he has no energy to dictate navy exercise. “There isn’t a requirement that the company obtain [historic preservation officers’] ‘concurrence’ or ‘approval,’” the engineer wrote.
Once I visited Lujan in his one-story cubicled workplace constructing, he was surprisingly candid about this dynamic. For a lot of the interview, he spoke about how his workplace is doing the most effective it may with an undersize employees. Then, as I acquired as much as go away, he started to articulate Guam’s lack of energy within the face of the US navy. “They’ve carried out their EISs,” he stated. “Until you’ve got some sturdy pull in Congress to alter their thoughts, it’s occurring.”
Lujan then marveled on the scope of the buildup—the way it will convey an inflow of individuals to tiny Guam. “Inform me how that’s going to have an effect on a spot,” he stated. “Usually, for the more severe.”
For many CHamorus, climbing Pågat, the realm they saved from the live-fire ranges, is a religious expertise. Climbing down jagged limestone cliffs canopied by dense jungle, hikers come to a set of caves during which they’ll wade into the Northern Lens Aquifer in one of many few locations it surfaces. Previous the caves, they’ll stroll amongst shards of pottery, grinding mortars carved in rock, and the stone stilts on which CHamorus constructed their properties, all courting from round AD 900 to 1700. The forest’s silence is punctured solely by the sounds of footsteps and lizards scurrying out of their manner—that’s, till a navy airplane or helicopter roars by, breaking the serenity with deafening pressure. It’s a reminder that even having preserved this place, CHamoru resistance hasn’t modified who’s finally in cost.
“You’ll be able to’t actually impression what’s occurring right here on an area degree,” admitted Cara Flores, a We Are Guåhan organizer and founding father of a CHamoru manufacturing home. “On the finish of the day, it’s actually Congress that decides what occurs.”
And proper now Congress is selecting to additional militarize the Pacific. Along with Guam and the remainder of the Marianas, it’s exploring plans to construct new bases within the close by Republic of Palau and Federated States of Micronesia, island nations to which the US has unique navy entry. For probably the most half, Washington appears keener on staring down China than listening to the Indigenous communities that might be caught within the crossfire.
