"But what?" Jack demanded. There was no immediate answer. "All right, let's make another thing clear. The Northern Marianas were never a legal possession of Japan, despite what their ambassador told us. They were a Trust Territory under the League of Nations, and so they were not war booty to us when we took them in 1944 along with Guam. In 1947 the United Nations declared them a Trust Territory under the protection of the United States. In 1952 Japan officially renounced all claims to sovereignty to the islands. In 1978, the people of the Northern Marianas opted to become a Commonwealth, politically unified with the United States, and they elected their first governor—we took long enough to let them do that, but they did. In 1986 the U.N. decided that we had faithfully fulfilled our responsibilities to those people, and in the same year the people of those islands all got U.S. citizenship. In 1990 the U.N. Security Council closed out the trusteeship for good.

"Do we all have that? The citizens of those islands are American citizens, with U.S. passports—not because we made them do it, but because they freely chose to be. That's called self-determination. We brought the idea to those rocks, and the people there must have thought that we were serious about it."

"You can't do what you can't do," Hanson said. "We can negotiate—"

"Negotiate, hell!" Jack snarled back. "Who says we can't?"

SecDef looked up from his notes. "Jack, it could take years to rebuild…the things we've deactivated. If you want to blame someone, well, blame me."

"If we can't do it—what's it going to cost?" the Secretary of Health and Human Services asked. "We have things we have to do here—"

"So we let a foreign country strip the citizenship rights of Americans because it's too hard to defend them?" Ryan asked more quietly. "Then what? What about the next time it happens? Tell me, when did we stop being the United States of America? It's a matter of political will, that's all," the National Security Advisor went on. "Do we have any?"

"Dr. Ryan, we live in a real world," the Secretary of the Interior pointed out. "All those people on those islands, can we put their lives at risk?"

"We used to say that freedom had a greater value than life. We used to say the same thing about our political principles," Ryan replied. "And the result is the world which those principles built. The things we call rights—nobody just gave them to us. No, sir. Those ideas are things we fought for. Those are things people died for. The people on those islands are American citizens. Do we owe them anything?"

Secretary Hanson was uncomfortable with this line of thought. So were others, but they deferred to him, grateful to be able to do so. "We can negotiate from a position of strength—but we have to go carefully."

"How carefully?" Ryan asked quietly.