I'm John Bachel with Cleopascal of the Foundation for the Defensive Democracy.

She's in Bali and Indonesia, in Oceania, this vast continent of water, where the peoples

are public of China and the U.S. and its allies, Australia and New Zealand notably, but

also France and Britain and Japan and India are dancing around each other in possession

of or in hope of securing, basing, securing relationships, we go to Nauru, which Cleopel

tells me, you could miss easily, with 12,000 people on each square miles exploited by colonial

masters in search of phosphate over these last years.

But now it's been disdained or shamed in some fashion because at one point, it recognized

Al-Qazi and South Ossetia, this connects to Ukraine many years ago when Georgia was torn

apart by an invasion by the Russian Federation.

At the same time, Nauru Cleopel informs me in her excellent piece on the Sunday Guardian,

is an iconoclast, recognizes Taiwan, recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, helped Australia

with the boat people, and is voting the U.S. ally NATO way when it comes to Ukraine.

Cleopel, what's wrong with this picture?

I can't find anything wrong with Nauru.

What is the State Department's opinion?

Well, there is a piece of legislation that was passed that any country recognizing

that Al-Qazi and South Ossetia wouldn't be eligible for aid projects, so you can do kind

of a million things right by the metric of what the U.S. says it wants, and then you make

one misstep, and this happened well before, they did the recognition well before the legislation

was passed, and suddenly you find yourself sort of boxed into a corner.

But the other thing is that, as you mentioned, it has a land, it's a one island, it has

...