The Maldives have always fascinated me. Their history is sketchy and derives from only a few excavated documents, but what we do know is rather interesting; they were visited by Ibn Battuta, with their capital serving as a prominent port of call for Arab sailors, and they were Buddhist until the 12th century C.E. For those few who may know anything about Maldivian history, I ask you this; how exactly could we wank them? The Maldives were only really noticed by outside powers in the 16th century, when the Portuguese tried and failed to conquer them; how could we make them potential colonizers, perhaps on the scale of one of the maritime South Indian kingdoms?
I'm not asking for the Maldives to become more powerful than the US, just that they become a regional power on the level of, say, Pakistan(though even that might be asking a lot, all things considered).