Gang of Democracies

Woodrow Wilson’s dream may yet become our nightmare.

By Justin Raimondo

"When I hear the word “democracy,” I reach not for my revolver, but for my wallet. I freeze and wait for the next blow to fall: a tax hike, another war, a new form of knavery masquerading as well-intentioned ignorance.

Imagining a “League of Democracies,” as a number of foreign-policy mavens have, I reach instead for the history books and recall the many incarnations—and failures, most of them bloody—of this perennial panacea. The League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson’s stillborn brainchild, was supposed to be just such an agency, deterring aggression and enforcing the right of nations to self-determination......

All too many of America’s leaders and would-be leaders do want a new Cold War, however, and the Concert of Democracies is a key weapon in their arsenal. The Russian defense of South Ossertia and Abhkazia against the Georgian invasion has renewed the debate over Georgia’s admission to NATO, but the Europeans are reluctant—they don’t want to go to war for Georgia’s dubious territorial claims, and Abkhazia has a long history as a distinct nation.

If NATO as an instrument of the new Cold War isn’t working as the War Party hoped, then the Concert of Democracies is Plan B, one that will have appeal beyond the offices of the American Enterprise Institute and the Weekly Standard. Neoconservative internationalists, such as Robert Kagan, are reaching out to liberal internationalists, such as Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution: the two recently authored an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for the establishment of such a league to fulfill “the responsibility to protect.” Daalder is an influential advisor to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, while Kagan, Newsweek noted, is “McCain’s foreign policy guru.”......"