Palau is a small archipelago nation of several hundred islands at the western edge of Micronesia, in the western Pacific. Home to a matrilineal island society for at least three thousand years, it was ruled in turn by Spain, Germany, Japan, and the United States before becoming independent in 1994, the last piece of the American-run Pacific trust territory to do so. A country of fewer than twenty thousand people, Palau is known for the Rock Islands and their marine lakes, for the ferocious 1944 Battle of Peleliu, and for using treaties and law to act far larger than its size.
In 1979 the people of Palau wrote into their constitution a ban on nuclear weapons so strict that overturning it required the agreement of three voters in four. Then the United States, which wanted the right to move nuclear-armed ships through Palauan waters, asked them to overturn it. What followed was one of the strangest contests of the late Cold War: a nation of fewer than fifteen thousand people voting again and again, some eight times across more than a decade, and again and again failing to reach the supermajority their own charter demanded. The standoff cost one president his life and, some believe, another his. A superpower and a speck of coral spent years unable to agree on the terms of a friendship.