This was a very interesting article. I did not know about the special statuses of Micronesia with the US. Similarly interesting about Puerto Rico being the largest bankruptcy ever in US history and it being a potential model for NJ and IL (because of their massive pension debt [0]).
Yep. It's a holdover from WW2 - most of Japan's island territories in the Pacific were handed to the US, UK, France, NZ, and AUS by the UN to be managed and governed. Most of those territories were given independence and sovereignty in the 80s-90s, but because of their tiny size they still remain dependent on those countries, Taiwan (development grants for recognizing Taiwan), and China (development grants for not recognizing Taiwan).
That's a bit different. Tahiti's ties to France go back long before WWII as it was a French "protectorate" (colony) starting in the 1840s, and has been under French rule ever since, although now it (as part of French Polynesia) is an "overseas country" of France meaning it has a large degree of self-rule not unlike Puerto Rico's relationship to the US.
Yep. The Special Committee on Decolonization was started specifically to help with giving soverignity to the various Pacific islands. The US gave soveriginity to most of it's former territories back in the 80s
Fun fact - I’m a photographer in rural Minnesota and I photographed 3 different senior girls from Micronesia one winter. Apparently a town about an hour from me has a little community of people from there, which I’d never known before.
GCP Gray has a nice quick overview of all territories and their overlapping, conflicting, and controversial statuese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASSOQDQvVLU (just six minutes)
[0] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...