Carothers on the League of Democracies

The article came out a few months ago, but the Carnegie Endowment’s Thomas Carothers did an excellent article in Foreign Policy magazine over the summer called “A League of Their Own” that summarizes most of the key reasons why John McCain’s idea for a “League of Democracies” is deeply misguided and why we should be glad that the left-of-center supporters of this idea seem to have scaled back their vision to something more realistic. I’m going to do some key excerpts. First, on the misbegotten heritage of the whole thing:

No doubt much of the world is probably yearning for such a tack in U.S. foreign policy. Sadly, however, though a League of Democracies looks like a new idea, it is not. It embodies the same instincts that lie behind the made-to-order multilateralism that the world has grown so tired of under President George W. Bush. This includes a desire for American control over the group’s membership, a lack of interest in the actual views of others, and an insistence on projecting U.S.-centric ideas onto countries that are increasingly less willing to follow America’s lead. A League of Democracies, as its backers envision it, is not what the world has in mind when it dreams of a new era of international cooperation.

Second, on the point that you can’t start a club that nobody wants to join:

Nor do calls for a League of Democracies appear to be born out of any genuine effort to canvass policymakers in other countries
to find out if the idea interests them at all. The muted response coming from fellow democracies in reply to U.S. pronouncements about the need for a league is notable. When [Robert] Kagan wanted to point to the support the league garners in Europe, the most he could muster was
one conservative Danish politician. This lack of apparent consultation in the formulation of the idea helps explain its remarkable tone-deafness
to the current international mood, particularly with regard to democracy and democracy promotion. Thanks in large part to President Bush’s insistent characterization of the war in Iraq as the centerpiece of his “global freedom agenda,” people the world
over now see democracy promotion as a dishonest, dangerous cover for the projection of U.S. power and influence. Given this, trying to bridge
the gap between the United States and the world by proposing yet another U.S.-led, democracy-focused global initiative reflects an almost willful obliviousness to how such an idea would be perceived and received outside the United States.

And last, on the weird idea that a “democracies only” club would somehow be eager to rubberstamp American military ventures:

And when it comes to including such diverse democracies as Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Mongolia, and South Africa, the prospect that the United States would find in such a league a forum ready to toe the U.S. line on a host of security, economic, and political issues is dim. As former British ambassador to the United Nations David Hannay recently pointed out, the U. N. voting records of Brazil, India, and South Africa—among the most successful democracies in the developing world— reveal that “they are among the most anti-inter- ventionist of all U.N. members and the most hesitant about authorizing the use of force.”

Meanwhile, this isn’t a merely hypothetical issue. One of our Presidential candidates has put this idea at the center of his international agenda. And yet thus far the merits of the proposal have received radically less scrutiny than the issue of whether or not “lipstick on a pig” is a sexist phrase.