FSM Flag JCN - Federated States of Micronesia Joint Committee on Compact Economic Negotiations













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The Nature of the Compact Renegotiation
What it Is, What it Isn't, or, "Ten Things to Remember"

  1. Don't confuse this partial Compact renegotiation with a political status choice. These are two different things.
  2. Going through the right processes, the people of the FSM can always change the current status of sovereign independence to something else. The Compact renegotiation is not the right process.
  3. The sovereign people of the FSM formed a sovereign country in 1979, when they adopted the FSM Constitution. Then the FSM Government was formed under that Constitution to represent the sovereign rights of the people to self-government.
  4. Under the UN Trusteeship, the US acted as a temporary caretaker for the FSM's administration, but the US never was sovereign over the FSM.
  5. After gradually pulling back from that caretaker role, the US withdrew from it altogether in 1986, and the FSM fully assumed its own self-government
  6. Exercising that power, the people of the FSM decided to approve a treaty with the US (the Compact) which delegated to the US for an indefinite period the responsibility for FSM's defense. In return, the US promised to give aid, some of which (not all) was limited to fifteen years.
  7. So the Compact is nothing more than an ongoing deal freely entered into between two sovereign countries (FSM and US), which either country can cancel. This example of Free Association is not a limitation on the FSM's political status.
  8. But this renegotiation is not about whether to cancel the Compact, and the Compact is not getting ready to run out. This renegotiation is only about replacing the portion of Compact financial and other aid that is getting ready to run out.
  9. If, after the negotiations, the people of the FSM don't like the deal, they can refuse to accept it, cancel the Compact, look elsewhere for their assistance needs, or even seek some form of different relationship with the US, such as colony or commonwealth. But as we are seeing just now in Guam's and Puerto Rico's cases, questions of Commonwealth are not easily resolved with the US.
  10. The place to start with in any internal FSM discussion about changing its political status from independent country to something else is the FSM Constitution. That document, and that document alone is the basis of FSM's political status. The Compact is important, but it is not a status document.