The following is provided solely for informational purposes. The tour is being sponsored by the British American Secuirty Council, Center for Defense Information, Council for a Liveable World, Fourth Freedom Forum, International Peace Bureau, Peace Action Education Fund, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Women's Action for New Directions. Media Alert No to NATO Expansion Speakers Tour: Stimulating Public Debate on NATO Expansion
Senate Ratification in Doubt as Questions Mount Diplomats, retired military officers, and policy experts will tour fifteen cities to launch a national debate on the expansion of NATO in the run up to the Senate ratification vote expected in March. Sponsored by a broad coalition of citizens groups, the No to NATO Expansion Speakers Tour will raise popular awareness of the costs and consequences of this top foreign policy issue. The once-certain entry of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic is now clouded by controversy over the true cost of NATO expansion, dubbed the mother of all unfunded mandates. Cost estimates for the first planned round of expansion range from $1.5 billion to $125 billion over the next decade. The Clinton Administration is pushing for admission of up to a dozen or more former Eastern bloc nations over the next decade, which could cost U.S. taxpayers up to $250 billion out of a total $500 billion cost to NATO countries. At the same time, eminent foreign policy experts believe the expansion plan to be fatally flawed and inherently dangerous to U.S. and global security. Leading foreign policy experts from Russia, East and West Europe, the U.S. and Canada will visit Boston, New York, Yale, Princeton, Washington, D.C., Tampa, Atlanta, Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. Speakers include Dr. Alla Yaroshinskaya, advisor to President Yeltsin and former member of the Russian parliament; Ann Clwyd, MP in the U.K.'s new Labor Government; Sir Hugh Beach, retired four-star British general and former NATO Brigade Commander in Germany; former Sen. Gary Hart; Douglas Roche, Canada's Ambassador for Disarmament 1984-89 and former member of Parliament, Canada; Dr. Robert de Wijk, former advisor to the Netherlands Ministry of Defense. A politically diverse group of experts, containing both supporters of the NATO alliance and those who seek its dissolution, the speakers assert that expansion would redivide and remilitarize Europe; reopen recent arms control reductions; trigger Russian rearmament, create an arms sales bonanza in Eastern Europe financed by U.S. loans, and make renewed nuclear confrontation with Russia more likely. It is further troubling that NATO expansion would undermine the three great cooperative organizations of Europe: the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and the European Union. The No to NATO Expansion Speakers Tour asks who will profit and who will pay? Why does Clinton seek to burden American taxpayers and soldiers with costs and obligations that the Eastern Europeans are not able to pay, to defend them from a Soviet threat which no longer exists, while provoking great hostility in Russia when, for once, Russia faces a Europe without any territorial ambitions? To debate the costs and consequences of NATO expansion with foremost international NATO analysts and political leaders, call us today at 401-751-8172. Join the Great NATO Debate, destined to become the most contentious foreign policy issue since NAFTA.
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