If an apocalypse struck Earth, Sam Bankman-Fried—the billionaire tech entrepreneur behind the United States’ most explosive cryptocurrency scandal—wasn’t ready to die.

If an apocalypse struck Earth, Sam Bankman-Fried—the billionaire tech entrepreneur behind the United States’ most explosive cryptocurrency scandal—wasn’t ready to die.

Like any responsible doomsday prepper, the now-convicted FTX founder hatched a survival plan. According to a memo between his brother and an FTX executive, Bankman-Fried planned to buy the Pacific island nation of Nauru and build a bunker that he could retreat to if a cataclysmic event wiped out at least half of the global population. Never mind, of course, that Nauru—a sovereign country—was never actually up for sale.

A tiny island whose very future may be threatened by climate change may seem like a strange doomsday hideout. Stretching just 8.1 square miles, the country has scarce fertile land and fresh water—a far cry from the lush escape that Bankman-Fried may have envisioned. With so few domestic options, the island’s nearly 13,000 residents must import more than 90 percent of their food, and childhood obesity rates have skyrocketed to some of the highest in the world.

All of these troubles mark a surprising turn for a country that once claimed the world’s second-highest GDP per capita. Nauru is the “world’s richest little isle,” the New York Times proclaimed in 1982, the result of a decadeslong mining rush for the island’s phosphate bounty. But once the mining boom went bust, so too did the money—setting Nauru on a quest for cash that has seen it launder money for the Russian mafia; effectively imprison refugees seeking asylum in Australia; and, most recently, abandon its long-standing Taiwan ties for Beijing.

None has quite done the trick. Now, Nauru is making one of its most controversial bets yet: mining the seafloor for the mineral treasures powering the global energy transition. It’s a move that has sparked alarm and suspicion, given the island’s checkered history. Yet the many contradictions of Nauru’s path here are as much a twisted tale of exploitation and extraction as they are a story of what one nation will do to survive.

Nauru is “one of the most unique and unusual countries in the world,” said John Connell, a professor at the University of Sydney who studies the South Pacific. “That country has inspired all kinds of strange things to happen, and Sam Bankman-Fried’s one is just a very recent one of a chain of strange activities,” he added.

Workers mine phosphate in Nauru in 1968.

The rise and fall of Nauru’s vast fortune can be traced back to one basic source: bird poop.

Bird droppings may not strike you as even a mildly desirable resource, but they are rich in phosphate, a fertilizer input that underpins the world’s agricultural systems—and Nauru’s land was once covered in the stuff, which accumulated and hardened over millions of years. That natural bounty has long enticed a steady stream of colonial powers—namely Australia, Britain, and New Zealand, which were named as Nauru’s trustees in the aftermath of World War II—that swiftly stripped and then shipped away the country’s phosphate, allocating only a tiny fraction of profits to Nauruans.

Nauru “hasn’t been dealt an easy hand. It’s been exploited in many, many different ways by a whole range of larger powers,” said Cleo Paskal, an expert in the Indo-Pacific region at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Nauru ultimately secured its independence in 1968. But before that point, the three powers had so thoroughly stripped its phosphate deposits that in the early 1960s, Canberra—then charged with administering the country—proposed eventually resettling Nauruans on an Australian island. Nauruans rejected that plan, electing instead to buy back control of their phosphate industry in 1967 and continue extraction; they later took Canberra to the International Court of Justice over the plunder. To this day, phosphate mining has left more than 70 percent of the country uninhabitable, according to the United Nations.

The upside was that money was flooding into Nauru, at one point catapulting the country’s GDP per capita to the second highest in the world as phosphate royalties peaked at 1.7 billion Australian dollars (about $1.1 billion in the United States). The “phosphate economy was booming, and the spinoff was all of this income that was coming into the country,” Connell said. “Unfortunately, most of their investment strategies were........

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