Source: United States Senator for Delaware Christopher Coons
WASHINGTON – Yesterday, U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.), member of the U.S. Senate NATO Observer Group and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, joined his colleagues who traveled with him on a recent congressional delegation to Sweden, Finland and the NATO Summit in Madrid on the Senate floor. He discussed his travel, the current unity of NATO, and the urgent need to swiftly ratify the two countries’ accession to the alliance.
You can see his full remarks below.
Sen. Coons: I rise today to join the leaders of the CODEL that I just had the honor and the blessing of joining—Senator Shaheen and Tillis—and a number of the other members of that CODEL—Senators Ernst and Blunt—and was grateful for the chance to also travel with Senators Durbin, and Fischer. And to just join in my colleagues’ statement today: I think this was a tremendous opportunity for us in Sweden, and in Finland, to meet with nations that are advanced economies, that are closely aligned with our values, that have sophisticated militaries, and that now, for the very first time, are seeking admission to NATO.
NATO is the most successful security alliance in world history, and it’s rooted in shared values and shared concerns and interests, and one of the most vulnerable pieces of NATO if you’d looked at the map just a few months ago were three little Baltic states—Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia—that for decades were under the heel of the Soviet Union, relatively newly independent in recent decades, admitted to NATO, but very difficult to defend. And I’ll tell you one of the reasons I joined with my colleagues in saying here, as we did in Madrid, that we should swiftly ratify the joining to NATO of both Sweden and Finland is that they will provide security. They will be security contributors to this alliance.
The odds that a young man or a woman from Iowa or North Carolina, from Missouri, New Hampshire, or Delaware, will have to go defend Estonia, will have to go risk or give their life defending Latvia or Lithuania, will go down dramatically. If we have on that border at the very northern end of the NATO Alliance, a new 830-mile border between Finland and Russia, that the Russians know they will have to defend and pay attention to given the unique history of the ’39-‘40 War, where countries aligned with our values and priorities are going to continue to contribute to this important alliance.
It was valuable that in our meetings with heads of state from Europe, like Chancellor Scholz, and from the Indo-Pacific like Prime Minister Kishida of Japan, in conversations with foreign secretaries like Liz Truss of the United Kingdom, or meetings with the foreign ministers of Italy, and of Germany, and of France, and of Spain, that this delegation was able to speak with one voice and to articulate why we joined the Biden administration in supporting NATO accession for these two critical new partners.
The last point I want to make is that I am hopeful, I am optimistic that we will continue to provide unified, bipartisan, robust support for Ukraine’s brave and fierce defense of its nation and its sovereignty in the face of Russia’s war crimes, Russia’s continued aggression. We are calling on all of our NATO allies to step up and to contribute and to participate, and they are.
This has brought greater unity, greater purpose, greater focus to the NATO alliance than anything in decades — and I’ll remind you, the one time that the Article 5 sacred obligation to come to each other’s defense has been triggered before was in Afghanistan, and thousands and thousands of NATO soldiers served alongside ours in Afghanistan when it was the United States that was attacked on 9/11. This NATO alliance is stronger than it’s ever been and needs to be the strongest it’s ever been, because as my colleagues have both laid out clearly and concisely, this is a pivotal moment in the future of the United States and our role in the world, the future of NATO and Western freedom. We must make sure that we succeed and I am so grateful for the bipartisan commitment that was at the core of this delegation.
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