“Molon Labe moment???”
This is one of those things where America’s enemies get to attack the US on its high moral stance by pointing out, hey, look here where you’re not following your own morals. Let’s suppose the US gave the Island to the descendants of the natives who got moved off. There would be no income for them and very quickly someone like China would take it over. If you “game” all the possibilities out to, say, twenty years, all outcomes would be worse for the larger world than America just holding on to the situation as it exists. That Island is the key to maintaining peace on a quarter of the globe. Well worth some moral ambiguity.
BTW, I’m sure these are the same people who want to give reparation payments to black people from people who never owned slaves and to people who were never slaves. One of my final conversations with a black guy I “liked” included him saying “your people” did ‘thus and such.’” I said, “You mean my father and his family who immigrated from Sweden? Or, perhaps my mother’s family, who fought in the Union army and ran a station on the underground railroad?” He said, “They were all white.” (I think that might have been the final time we spoke.)
What makes you think it ever had natives, and that the natives were moved off?
What did the natives, if any, call themselves? Just asking because someone else said the place was uninhabited before the French showed up.