Gregorio Sablan: “What is happening now in Puerto Rico should be a warning of what could happen in other U.S. insular areas.”

There is no easy way that our nation will be able to maintain our influence in what is becoming an increasingly strategic, important, and contested area of the world without continuing our partnership with the COFA nations.

Today is, indeed, a very important day, historic in some ways, because it marks the beginning of what I hope and I believe will be a successful bipartisan effort to renew the financial provisions of the Compacts of Free Association

I mentioned that the CNMI is facing financial conditions that make our commonwealth again acutely vulnerable to Chinese Communist Party exploitation.

There is no easy way that our nation will be able to maintain our influence in what is becoming an increasingly strategic, important, and contested area of the world without continuing our partnership with the COFA nations