As citizen-delegate, what would be your official opinion with regards to FRA membership? After all, most regions are drawn into the FRA-UIAF conflict whether they like it or not.
This is a question I will have to research as I know almost nothing about either organization. In fact, I could only tell you what one of the two acronyms stands for. My greatest weakness as Citizen-Delegate is my lack of GP knowledge/experience. I may have been in Taijitu for years but that’s one part of NS I never really got into.
The FRA is the Founderless Regions Alliance, founded shortly before Taijitu as an alliance of then-founderless North Pacific (not to be confused with The North Pacific), Jethnea, and Global Right Alliance. It morphed over time from an alliance for defense of member regions, many of which might be founderless, into a defender organization. Today, founderless regions (besides Game-created ones) are generally discouraged from joining FRA as I understand matters. The FRA Rangers, Rejected Realms Army, Lazarene Liberation Army, and Global Right Alliance Defence Force are among the defender armies affiliated with the FRA.
The UIAF is the United Imperial Armed Forces of The Land of Kings and Emperors, The New Inquisition and Albion: they have a treaty of mutual cooperation with The Black Riders, but do not consider themselves to be raiders: instead they see themselves as imperialist. They have a long standing feud with the FRA, and more recently with the UDL as well. In February 2012 The New Inquisition copied our old maneuver by, after invading belgium and gathering assorted raiderish friends to support them there, ejecting the entire pile of invaders and seizing the Rejected Realms' delegacy for 12 hours. (In this they had the support of the LKE, but neither the UIAF as a formal entity nor Albion as a region existed yet). More recently UIAF figures have expressed hostility to the government of Lazarus, which they view as illegitimate following the expulsion of NES and Griffin (TNI's founder) from Lazarus. Europeia is allied with the regions in question, but is not part of the UIAF, perhaps because it does not consider itself Imperialist.
In the recent operation in Anne Frank, we had both the FRA and the ERN and UIAF working with us, the NPA and EPSA effectively serving as glue between the two sides. The mutual suspicion between the UIAF and many defenders made this somewhat challenging to organize.
The FRA summary is pretty good - one part to change is that founderless regions aren't discouraged from applying, but there just aren't very many founderless candidates for membership.
In addition to hating the FRA and UDL, UIAF doesn't get along with TITO either - which covers the vast majority of defender forces in the game.
And on the last note - plenty of defenders would like to see more ERN/UIAF defending activity. They just choose not to do so.
I should note that in posted justifications of the aforementioned invasion of belgium (http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=161927) and a more recent invasion of Canada (http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?p=21190303#p21190303), TNI/LKE/UIAF has made clear that they see alliance with defenders in general or even friendship with them as reasonable grounds for an incursion on their part.
(By incursion I meant invasion)