Country as required field – problem

I’m looking to require the user to select the country in order to register on my site.

I made a required field for “Country” on the account registration page and made it a required field using a dropdown box.

However, the problem is when you go the the registration page, instead of the dropdown box showing blank or “Choose country…”, that dropdown box is already populated with the first country on the list which happens to be Afghanistan.

So technically, the user can skip it or forget to select their country and just submit their registration since a country is already selected and they won’t get an alert to select a country. So technically, even though it’s a required field, it won’t act like one so technically it really isn’t a required field. lol

How do I make it so that the dropdown box is either blank or shows “Choose country…” so that if they forget to select a country, the form will spit back an alert message telling them to select a country?