What’s unsettling about McCain’s revival of the talk of a League of Democracies is that U.S. foreign policy for the last six years has been so far out there that his proposal sounds like the product of a relatively reasonable and sane mind.  That’s how bad things are.  Under normal circumstances, McCain’s idea would be written off as loopy, the establishment equivalent of warning about black helicopters, but our foreign policy has run so far off the rails that an overtly pro-interventionist alliance aimed at attacking other countries somehow seems more consultative and friendly and reasonable.  “In the next war, we won’t be fighting alongside Estonians and Mongolians–we’ll have the Brazilians with us!”  Perhaps that’s the thinking.  The “coalition of the willing” was one of the greatest, most embarrassing flops of all time for a superpower, so perhaps an institutionalised “coalition of governments based on the will of the people” will do a bit better when the time comes to attack without provocation yet another small, overmatched country.  I await the counterargument from proponents of unfettered independent national action who do not want to have to justify themselves before the representatives of decadent Belgium and lascivious Brazil (or whatever their objections would be). 

Yglesias points out some of the main flaws with the proposal (for one thing, he says that the leading Non-Aligned Movement states would likely have nothing to do with this transparent hegemonist ploy), and Bob Wright suggests that neocon enthusiasm for a League is a way of creating a new Cold War (that sounds right) by pointedly excluding all those powers and regions that the neocons seem intent on fomenting conflict with in the first place.  It seems to me that it is simply a larger version of the new NATO, which theoretically requires members to be at least passably democratic states (but entertains applications from Albania and Georgia) and which is no longer constrained by anything so limited as its founding treaty or the strategic imperatives of guarding against a threat from the east that no longer exists.  It now practically serves as the international armed forces of the hegemony, provided that the mission can somehow be related to the “war on terror.”  The League represents a move beyond this: to create a permanent institutional basis for international meddling wherever the “democratic nations” (read America and Britain) believe it is necessary.  Since many of the fledgling democracies around the world are relatively poor and need development assistance (controlled by the IMF and World Bank, which are effectively controlled by Washington), their collaboration with any League effort is almost guaranteed.  The tricky part comes when industrialised and modernising democratic states are involved.  Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil, India, Argentina, Bangladesh (which is more or less democratic most of the time) and Indonesia together have a huge number of people and some considerable natural resources, and their politics are nowadays are decidedly not in harmony with the goals of McCain and the neocons or even with the Washington establishment in general.  There is nothing to stop them from making a NAM-style league of democracies that directly repudiates any Washington-backed League’s claim to represent democracies around the world, and it seems likely that someone would either use their position within the NAM or would create something parallel with it to voice their opposition. 

It is a given that countries such as Russia, Venezuela and Bolivia would not belong to the League of Democracies, not because they are not democratic, because all three are rather obnoxiously democratic, but because their democracies are not sufficiently liberal.  It will not be long before “democracy” in this context will be defined to mean “constitutional republican democracy with a ‘free-market’ economy ruled by managerial elites in conjunction with corporate interests.”  So it should actually be called the Managerial League, or something equally uninspiring.  Also, it is specifically in order to make possible international action without a Russian or Chinese veto that neocons and others want this League, so including Russia would defeat the entire purpose of the League, part of which would almost certainly be to contain, threaten and harrass Russia. 

I understand why internationalists fed up with the U.N. want to create a leaner, meaner U.N. that doesn’t have to take account of the reality that at least a third of the world’s population doesn’t live under democratic rule.  Presumably such a League would try to avoid the structural flaws of U.N. permanent member vetoes that hobble any real collective security action, which in turn would mean that any non-member or member state that makes the mistake of getting on the wrong side of a majority of the League would probably be targeted for another round of “liberation.”  I don’t see how any of this actually serves the American interest or the interests of the other states that would called upon to participate in the League’s many ill-advised adventures, but then maybe that’s because it doesn’t serve the interests of most people.