Tiwain isn’t just a ‘tiny piece of land’ when you understand the demographics of it’s location in that region. It’s like a giant road block off their coast for China. A good comparison is The Cuban Missile Crisis. Not many realize how extremely close we came to nuclear war at that time.....over “a tiny piece of land’.
Cuba is 730 miles long. So you were wise to put “tiny piece of land” in quotation marks.