An effort by a U.S. senator to make a renewed push for Georgian membership in NATO has been foiled. From The Daily Caller:
Last week, while most senators were focused on the important national issues of war funding and Americans' constitutional liberties, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) seemed more concerned with the fate of a foreign country. Behind the scenes, Rubio moved to have a unanimous consent vote that would have hastened Georgia's entry into NATO. The unanimous consent vote never happened because Senator Rand Paul single-handedly prevented it.
This is not a triviality. Make no mistake: Bringing Georgia into NATO could lead to a new military conflict for the United States, which is why any move that would facilitate Georgia's entry into the alliance should be publicly debated. Rubio's attempt to push this through by unanimous consent - that is to say, without any formal debate or vote - is highly suspect and calls into question the senator's better judgment.
The American Spectator has a bit more detail:
"It called for the President to lead a diplomatic effort to get approval of Georgia's Membership Action Plan during the upcoming NATO Summit in Chicago," a Rubio spokesman explained in an email.
Rubio and Paul are both new senators, elected in 2010, and embody the two poles of the Tea Party's foreign policy: Rubio for a muscular American exceptionalism, and Paul for a small-government isolationism. (Jack Hunter, who wrote the Daily Caller piece, is the official blogger of the presidential campaign of Rand Paul's father, Ron Paul.)
Daniel Larison, probably correctly, sees Rubio's move as a symbolic effort to tweak Russia, which even if it had passed would have had no real effect:
Renewed efforts to bring Georgia into NATO would not only sour U.S.-Russian relations, which is probably what Rubio wants, but it would necessarily heighten tensions between Georgia and Russia and could precipitate a new round of fighting. NATO membership for Georgia serves no American interest, and the indications of support that the U.S. gave to Georgia during the Bush administration proved disastrous for Georgia as well.
That said, Rubio's amendment would not have mattered very much if it had passed. One reason that Georgia was not brought into NATO earlier is that leading European governments had no interest in extending the alliance's security guarantees to such a poor and fragmented state.
It's interesting that Rubio's resolution would have pushed for the Membership Action Plan for Georgia, something that had been taken off the table in 2008 in favor of a NATO-Georgia Commission. Since then, there really hasn't been much talk about MAP, and in its public statements even the Georgian government seems to have accepted that. I wonder, are Georgia's lobbyists quietly pushing MAP behind the scenes? Or is Rubio going rogue on this one? And in what looks to be an atmosphere of heightened tension between the U.S. and Russia, I wonder if this is something the Republican presidential candidate will make an issue of in the campaign next year.

Eurasia.net