Amos,

Look at the article before you comment- Obama seems to support it as well. Or at least his advisors ...




"Pundits and bloggers have seized on the proposal as proof that McCain, like George W. Bush before him, is in thrall to the "radical neocons" who allegedly authored the war in Iraq.

They couldn't be more wrong. In fact, a league of democracies is not a new but a very old idea. In the past decade it has been promoted mostly by Democrats, including several of Barack Obama's top foreign policy advisers. And as the dramatic events in places such as Burma and Zimbabwe have demonstrated in recent weeks, it's not a utopian plan but a practical tool that the next president is very much going to need.

First let's dispose of the authorship question. The more academically minded, such as Princeton's G. John Ikenberry, trace the idea of a league of like-minded nation states to Immanuel Kant; more to the point, a prototype organization was created by the Clinton administration's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and democracy specialist Morton Halperin. Their Community of Democracies, founded in 2000, still exists but has been hamstrung by its initial decision to include numerous countries that are not, in fact, democracies -- such as Egypt, Jordan and Azerbaijan.

In 2006, Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School and a likely player in a Democratic administration, proposed a "Concert of Democracies" in the final report of the Princeton Project, a comprehensive review of national security they orchestrated. Under their plan, members of the alliance would have to be real democracies that held regular multiparty elections. The group's purpose would be ambitious: first to work within existing global institutions such as the United Nations; but in the event that those fail, to provide a framework for organizing and legitimizing international interventions, including the use of military force.

The Concert of Democracies scheme was further elaborated last year by Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, who argued in an article in the American Interest that it could encompass up to 60 nations, including 28 of the 30 largest economies. Daalder, who was a foreign policy coordinator for Howard Dean in 2004, is now an adviser to Obama. In a response to the article, Anthony Lake, the candidate's senior foreign policy hand, said that "a functioning Concert of Democracies would not only be much in the American national interest . . . it could be, in important measure, transformative for the world." Daalder later co-authored an article in The Post supporting the idea with McCain adviser Robert Kagan, a forceful proponent in his own right -- which may explain the "neocon" smear. "