Well, this is a little startling.
Palau is only “nominally independent.” That’s what it says on the Wikipedia page for “Postal Codes in Oceania.” Here I was, thinking Palau was its own country, and it’s only nominally its own country? This is wild. Wilder still, the United States actually owns it? Palauans! My own countrymen.
It turns out that what happened here is, more or less, Pearl Harbor. Japan tried to take over the world, we stopped them, part of stopping them involved picking up a bunch of islands in the Pacific. After the war, we made an agreement with the United Nations that made Palau, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands an American “trust territory.” The idea with these was, to hear the UN tell it, that we’d prepare them for eventual independence and majority rule, and that’s mostly what came to pass. There were a lot of trust territories globally, split across the Pacific and Africa and entrusted to the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, France, and Italy. By now, all of them except for part of our trust territory in the Pacific have graduated to independence. Ours? It split into the Northern Mariana Islands, now a U.S. territory, and three nominally independent nations. We give them defense, funding, some social services (like mail), and in exchange we get to put military bases on the islands if and when we want to do that.
Officially, I guess Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands are called “associated states,” and they’re three of only five of these in the world. The other two are other islands, and they’re associated with New Zealand, but unlike our three, New Zealand’s aren’t part of the UN themselves.
This feels a little like discovering I have a secret cousin. Palau, especially, since its date of independence is only four days after the day I was born. I am older than Palau. Never, in these 28 years, did I know we were related.
