Wake Island, which is actually three islands surrounding a lagoon, is an unincorporated territory of the United States, administered by the Office of Insular Affairs, which is a division of the U.S. Department of the Interior. There is a US Air Force base on Wake, with missiles ready for launch, and access is strictly limited. The nearby republic, the Marshall Islands, also claims sovereignty over Wake Island, as does another group of independent Marshall Islanders, called the Kingdom of EnenKio. Both claims which originate from the Marshall Islands, involve stories going back centuries, which state that their ancestors had inhabited the island group in ancient times, but no physical proof has been presented by anyone to date. The US took it over as an empty territory in 1899, and it was used as a Pan American Airways stop-off on the US-China route from 1935 until World War II broke out. It was then turned into a permanent military base, was violently taken over by the Japanese during the Battle of Wake Island, and after their WWII surrender, it went back to being a permanent US military base.

Formerly known as Netherlands New Guinea, after the Dutch colonists pulled out in 1963, it was then suddenly annexed by Indonesia. It declared it's independence in 1974, as the Republic of West Papua, but that was quickly crushed by the Indonesian military, as was the next effort in 1984, this time as the Republic of Great Melanesia. Those currently seeking independence are aiming to set up a Tribal Democracy, meaning an independent confederation of the tribes of West Papua, but they expect Indonesia to be very tough on those who openly look for it, forcing the independence underground. West Papua is currently the combined Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua, Indonesia's most easterly provinces, which form the western half of the Oceanian island of New Guinea. The independent country, Papua New Guinea, which itself operates with a tribal rural system, forms the other half of the island.