Justice league.(The Week)(United States's formation and joining with 'League of Democracies')

I HAVE been advocating a "League of Democracies" for several years now. I'm hardly alone. The idea is old and has popped up from time to time for a century. The phrase, embarrassingly enough, was widely used during debates over the Treaty of Versailles. Recently, John McCain called for just such a league and, on August 6, Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan argued for a "Concert of Democracies" in the Washington Post.

The basic argument is quite simple: America can surely go it alone when it has to, but going it alone is often more difficult than working with others. Indeed, the unpopularity and perceived illegitimacy of unilateralism makes the job harder simply because much of the world and most transnational elites see multilateralism as a good in and of itself. "Better to do wrong in a big group than do right alone" seems to be the mantra of the Davos and Turtle Bay Dithering and Dickering Societies. So, if working with others makes sense, why not work with nations that share your values and your interests? All the usual caveats notwithstanding, we usually call such nations "democracies."

This is not to say that our democratic allies are perfect or pliant. They're simply better than the alternative: the parliament of thugs known commonly as the United Nations. The place is a Yukon gold rush for kleptocratic scions of Third World autocracies, who plunder the world's wealth in the name of progress. It is a playground for global bureaucrats, who express their will-to-power by pushing for world government. And it treats totalitarian regimes as morally and politically indistinguishable from democratic ones. Indeed, the neo-Czarist regime ...