====== FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ======

America First Party
1630 A 30th Street #111
Boulder, Colorado 80301
http://www.AmericaFirstParty.org

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

NATO Membership for Georgia, Ukraine a Very Bad and Dangerous Idea

Boulder, CO - Despite the stratospheric commitments of U.S. foreign policy, Vice President Cheney, Senators McCain and Obama, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and the entire U.S. Senate have endorsed the goal of expanding those commitments even further by supporting the admission of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. This would continue the trend of expanding NATO security guarantees, which were recently extended to Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Like other treaties which have ensnared nations in bloody carnage during the last century, the NATO treaty provides a war guarantee; it commits the United States and its forces to heroic sacrifice and potentially to dangerous escalations with other nuclear armed nations. The treaty considers an attack on any alliance nation as an attack on all the member nations, and ensures the response of the alliance, militarily and in any other way deemed necessary, to restore the peace.

The recent nonsensical war in Georgia and the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (effectively independent of Georgia since 1991 and 1992, respectively) and the Russian intervention, illustrate the risk of extending NATO. Russian President Medvedev recently affirmed that Russia's response would have been identical if Georgia had already been in the alliance. If Georgia had been part of NATO at the time of the Russian intervention, there is great possibility that the U.S. and Russia would now be at war.

The danger of this contingency is highlighted by the Russian reliance on nuclear weapons to compensate for their degraded conventional military capability; their 2000 Military Doctrine and large scale military exercises indicate a preparedness to respond to conventional attacks on themselves and their allies, including attacks by NATO, with massive nuclear counterstrikes.

In addition to the current danger of present NATO policy, U.S. membership in the alliance is inappropriate for other reasons. As our party platform states, NATO is illegal under U.S. law because the alliance claims "authority to direct our nation's armed forces into a war [armed conflict] without the constitutional requirement of Congress declaring war. Since NATO no longer serves a defensive purpose for the United States, it is therefore time that we withdraw from NATO and permit Europe the task of defending itself."

Contacts:
Jonathan Hill, National Chairman, 1-866-SOS-USA1, ext. 4
Michael Lynch, Press Secretary, 1-866-SOS-USA1, ext. 2

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