John McCain gets credit for the first new, big and good idea of the campaign season: a League of Democracies.
The Arizona senator will call for such an organization to be "the core of an international order of peace based on freedom" in a speech Tuesday at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
"We Americans must be willing to listen to the views and respect the collective will of our democratic allies," McCain says, according to excerpts his campaign provided. "Our great power does not mean we can do whatever we want whenever we want, nor should we assume we have all the wisdom, knowledge and resources necessary to succeed."
"To be a good leader, America must be a good ally," he adds in the speech, another in a series of policy addresses as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination.
Some folks at Yglesias are disturbed that this sounds very much like an idea emanating from Princeton and one of the Obama strategists called the Concert of Democracies. If you hear that phrase, then you can be sure that it's the 'blue' version which might be updated for partisan spite.
Since we are in the world of post-state actors, this can fill some of the diplomatic vacuum that has rendered NATO into something of a nullity. It can also give a name to the program started under GWBush to the international information sharing that has attrited the AQ network. The opposition has been loathe to acknowledge this aspect of the GWOT, focusing instead on GTMO and Abu Ghraib as exemplary instead of things like the capitulation of Libya and the busting up of AQ Khan's proliferation network.
The League would be a validation and strategic acknowledgment of the defacto military arrangement that the US provides the global economy. Which is to say Europe and Japan don't spend money on their own militaries because the US does. That is what the US Navy does - it keeps the seas safe from piracy and projects force. The Netherlands needn't have a naval power to protect all of the Shell supertankers despite the fact that they would make a great terrorist target for AQ.
It's a much more proper establishment for security arrangements as it would have requirements for certain standards of human rights that everybody knows China and Russia and Saudi Arabia are not interested in. It thereby becomes a moral organization for stability that you simply can't buy your way into while still funding assassinations, suppressing free speech, or oppressing women.
It seems clear to me that Pakistan doesn't get to belong. Nor Iran. That is because there should be a presumption of non-aggression within the pact. We simply have to say that India is more democratic than Pakistan despite our unilateral agreements. Obviously we can't have supporters of non-state actors like the global Hizb. Of course I like the idea of Mexico, Brazil and India in the mix.
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