For the first time in six months, I spent a night off of the island of Saipan. I took a six-day work trip to Rota, the southernmost of the Northern Mariana Islands. While there, I joined a few dozen Guamanians visiting for their annual hiking trip on the island. There is much to write about Rota, but I want to dwell a bit on Guam.
There were two primary news stories that people were discussing when I was there. The first is the revelation of Donald Trump saying “Guam is not America,” from the long-form reporting about General Mike Milley, the Former Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the Atlantic. It is an odd thing to just blurt out, even for one so famous for non-sequiturs as Trump. The context was the dire threat Guam faces from any potential North Korean aggression during the “Fire and Fury” and “Little Rocket Man” days of Trump goading Kim Jong Un with words. Remember “dotard.”
I am not particularly surprised by this opinion from the ‘shithole country’ guy, but even if it was a mere factual mistake, it would not be shocking. Most Americans don’t know that Guam is part of the United States, though certainly more do than know that the CNMI is.
Guam is better known than Saipan because of military history. It has been a part of the United States for half a century longer. Because of the large military installations there, hundreds of thousands of US armed service members and their families have rotated through there over the last several decades. If you are an American, you are far more likely to have been to Guam than to Saipan.
The other primary story is the upcoming change in flight rates for Rota. This is a matter of existential importance for the islanders. I will write about that later, but I wanted to highlight the oddness of this fact: it is substantially more expensive to fly from Guam, 40 miles away, than from Saipan, at 75.
The historical and legal differences between Guam and the CNMI have eventually turned into cultural ones. As I have written before, Guam became a possession of the United States in 1898. This was as part of the same conflict where the US gained the Spanish holdings of Puerto Rico and the Phillippines. These islands had tens of millions of people. It was also the same year that American businessmen overturned the Hawaiian monarchy and claimed it for America. These substantially larger and (mostly) closer islands took up the bulk of the United States attention.
Somewhat incongruously in a year that expanded overseas holdings so dramatically, they chose not to control any of the islands north of Guam. Germany promptly purchased them, creating the separation between Guam and what is now the CNMI.
What is particularly odd to me is not merely that the United States did not take the entire northern chain - then sparsely populated and duplicating what Guam provided- but that it did not take Rota. It is much closer to Guam, had no primary occupants, and would make both the later wars and the present administration of the island much easier. The gap between the islands forms a channel that would certainly be easier to control with both sides.
Recently, the New York Times took a deep dive into Guam and the CNMI and the struggles of such a massive military buildup and long-standing presence. For anyone who has enjoyed my missives from the American Western Pacific, it is a must-read.
When the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was working towards dissolution, there was a strong preference by the people in what became the CNMI to reunify with Guam, creating a singular legal entity. In 1961, the locals voted in the first plebiscite on reintegration with Guam, favoring a separate status 1,642-875. In 1963, a second plebiscite was even more overwhelming, though the turnout was lower, 1,231-32 in favor of reintegration. In 1965 and in 1968, the newly formed legislatures of the Northern Mariana Islands sent resolutions to Congress requesting that the Guam Organic Act be amended to expand the boundaries to the northern end of the island chain.
Undoubtedly, the Marianas would be easier to administer if they were a single entity. Guam and the CNMI share a United States District Attorney. Pulling talent from 150,000 people to run what is in many ways a small quasi-independent nation is much easier than pulling twice as much from pots of 100,000 and 50,000. Separate utilities, telecoms, transportation, education, and infrastructure has hindered development with an entirely self-inflicted legal fiction. But reintegration is not seriously on the table any longer. So what went wrong?
Guam said “no”.
I will explain in my next post a bit about why Guam rejected their northern brethren after thousands of years of an interconnected and shared culture.