John Yoo uses the current debate over Ukraine as an excuse to revive one of the more foolish ideas of this century, the League or “Concert” of Democracies:

The U.S. cannot alter the United Nations Charter on its own. But it can join with its NATO allies to establish a true international alliance to defend the peace and simply ignore the U.N.’s paralysis. A Concert of Democracies could coordinate the use of force by the U.S., NATO, and their Asian allies to prevent great harms to global welfare and stability.

In practice, this mission of “preventing” great harm would mean that the U.S. and its allies routinely ignore international law just as blatantly as Russia has done in the last few weeks. I doubt very much that there would be many takers for this idea among our European and Asian allies, since they are normally not looking for a way to get into new wars without U.N. authorization. There would be a significant number large democracies that would want nothing to do with this, since they don’t share the obsession with interfering in other states’ internal affairs. The U.S. ignores international law and the U.N. Charter often enough as it is, but forming an institution for the explicit purpose of evading the requirements of both would thoroughly discredit U.S. actions in most other countries. It would be quite useful to the Russian and Chinese governments to have a permanent “coalition of the willing” waging illegal wars around the world, since they would use them to dismiss all Western criticisms of their actions and cite them as excuses for their own behavior.