WASHINGTON – In case you missed it, U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) joined Face the Nation on CBS yesterday to discuss the billions of dollars in new investments in semiconductor chips and advanced manufacturing in America, President Biden’s steadfast leadership in strengthening NATO, and security assistance for Ukraine.
You can watch the full interview here.
Margaret Brennan:A lot to talk about, but I want to start with China. America is reliant on its greatest adversary for key things: for missiles, for computer chips, electric vehicles. Do we need a domestic industrial policy? Why don't we have one?
Senator Coons:We do have one, Margaret. That's what the CHIPS and Science bill that President Biden signed into law last year, that Congress moved forward on a bipartisan basis, has delivered: tens of billions of dollars of new investments in onshoring semiconductor chip manufacturing, a record number of new advanced manufacturing sites in the United States.
There's more work for us to do on this in this Congress, and Senator Schumer and Republicans in the Senate are leading work on that. We have turned a corner on having an industrial policy in the United States that brings back manufacturing. That's the core of Bidenomics:rebuilding our economy from the middle out.
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Senator Coons: There has to be a security guarantee for Ukraine going forward. For them to be conceivably admissible to NATO, their equipment, their training, their military has to be up to NATO standards, and we are moving them in that direction; but I'll remind you back in 1994, in Budapest, the U.S., U.K., and Russia persuaded Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons in exchange for a commitment to a territorial security guarantee. Some sort of security guarantee for Ukraine has to be on the far side of this war, where so many Ukrainians are fighting and dying bravely to push back out the Russian aggressors who are occupying 20 percent of Ukraine today.