4 points
An important piece of history missing from this article is that back when IANA was formalized, they realized they couldn’t be the ones to arbitrate country level domains. There was already an international organization formalizing two character codes for country names, so they basically said that would be the decider.
In the same way, it’s not up to them whether to recognize a country’s existence, they rely on that international agreement and they need to abide by that
