Following his speech in DC on Monday night – which Scott posted on here
– Robert Kagan has a frightening column in today’s FT, defending the League of Democracies idea, as put forward by John McCain and various liberal IR strategists, including Barack Obama’s senior adviser, Ivo Daalder.

All the ingredients of bipartisan interventionism are here. Kagan begins with the usual fearmongering,

With tensions between Russia and Georgia rising, Chinese nationalism growing in response to condemnation of Beijing’s crackdown on Tibet, the dictators of cyclone-ravaged Burma resisting international aid , the crisis in Darfur still raging, the Iranian nuclear programme still burgeoning and Robert Mugabe still clinging violently to rule in Zimbabwe – what do you suppose keeps some foreign policy columnists up at night? It is the idea of a new international organisation, a league or concert of democratic nations.

He then praises the GOP presidential candidate for mooting the League,

The fact that Mr McCain has championed the idea might tell us something about his broad-mindedness. But Europeans should not reach for their revolvers just because the Republican candidate said it first.

Kagan challenges but does not name an FT columnist. This is Gideon Rachman, the FT’s foreign affairs correspondent, who responds to Kagan’s attack here.

Rachman writes,

[Kagan] writes that the idea of a league of democracies producing a ”new cold war” is “unduly alarmist”. But he doesn’t really explain why it is unduly alarmist.

Exactly. Though Kagan scoffs at his critics, and those who worry that a League of Democracies might upset whatever precarious balance of world power exists, he doesn’t answer their concerns. Indeed, he is conspicuously vague on what the League of Democracies might actually do.

“A league of democracies would… promote liberal ideals in international relations,” he suggests. But how?

Surely it is not alarmist to say that a L of D would draw western powers – the US foremost among them – into an unending string of disputes and conflicts in the name of human rights, protecting democracy, dignity etc. This would be its most logical consequence.

Kagan is a very brilliant man. His refusal to engage with the arguments directly rings a few alarm bells.

It seems his enthusiasm for the League is motivated by a desire to spread the global democratic system using a “concert”–a favorite new hawk word–of international force, rather than naked US power.

A new union of democratic global policing might arouse less antagonism than unilateral US aggression. But this only masks the wider problem: forcing peoples to accept the norms of liberal democracy is a dangerous and flawed strategy, as we have discovered in Iraq. What would we do with Russia, China, half of Africa, Korea, whoever stands in the way of the march of the demos and free-flowing capital? Threaten them? Attack them? It seems like a perfect recipe for more war.