McCain's "League of Democracies" Proposal, Rejected by Allies, Gains Traction with Hawks on Left and Right

Editor's note: For more on this story -- specifically how Senator McCain's proposal was greeted with disinterest by America's allies -- see "World Yawns at McCain's Coalition of Democracies" by Meninda Brouwer.

*****

A radical foreign policy idea put forth by presumptive Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has drawn cheers of support from sources as varied as his campaign's neo-conservative backers to liberal internationalists from the camp of his rival, Sen. Barack Obama. But the idea is not without some surprising detractors.

McCain's "League of Democracies" would be a new international organization whose membership is made up of democratic governments that meet certain minimal requirements.

The philosophical basis for the League is German philosopher Immanuel Kant's idea of "perpetual peace", which argues that democratic governments are less likely to go to war -- particularly with fellow democracies rather than autocratic regimes. But democratic nations may be at odds with non-democratic ones.

This is already well underway, according to neoconservative scholar and McCain adviser Robert Kagan, who sees a new "global competition" between democracies and autocracies.

Kagan believes that rising autocratic powers threaten the international order in part by blocking actions by the United Nations Security Council, where "autocratic states", like Russia and China, have the power to veto actions.

The League is intended to give like-minded democracies a multilateral vehicle that could authorize intervention in cases where the Security Council cannot act. Together, they could act on humanitarian crises and security issues without having to convince non-democratic U.N. members to go along.

Those non-democratic autocracies have sometimes blocked U.N. efforts at interventions in crises -- such as the violence in Sudan's Darfur region and the recent blocking of international aid to cyclone victims in Burma -- on the grounds that they violate national sovereignty.

The frustration caused by paralysis of the Security Council has also driven some liberal internationalists -- notably Obama adviser Ivo Daalder -- to support the idea of a League of Democracies. Preferring the moniker of a Concert of Democracies, Daalder and other liberals have written extensively in support of the idea, although Obama himself has yet to take a position on it.

Daalder and McCain agree that the League could serve U.S. interests above all by providing a new multilateral mechanism through which Washington could, with like-minded allies, intervene in international crises that paralyze the Security Council. They cite the example of NATO's 1999 intervention against Serbia, a Russian ally, in Kosovo as a model.

Moreover, Washington's reliance on a multilateral forum to authorize action would also help improve Washington's image, which has been badly battered by the George W. Bush administration's unilateralism.

But Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, among others, believes that the logic behind a League of Democracies is flawed and potentially dangerous.

Even accepting "perpetual peace", not fighting among themselves does not entail that democracies the world over will necessarily have similar foreign policies based on their democratic values, according to Carothers.

A clear example of this is South Africa's reluctance -- despite its democratic system -- to endorse Western foreign policy. South Africa has resisted action against Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe, perhaps because it has been seen as Western imperialism in a part of the world still reeling from colonialism.

South Africa has also ardently resisted U.S. efforts to base its new military command for Africa (AFRICOM) on the continent.