League of Democracies?



The Corsair believes that engaging in the United Nations, an organization built largely by America and Britain, and using the advantages of our Security council position is an important way -- and more so in the future -- of addressing international and national security issues. The combative Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "A Dangerous Place" is a classic text of an engaged American Ambassador duking things out at Turtle Bay. Clearly it is an imperfect instrument, even more so, however, when Republicans ignore it altogether then cry with manufactured exasperation "Useless" when the world deliberative body pushes back against the studious Republican non-chalance.

Yesterday's problematic vote of Russia, China and -- worst of all -- South Africa against sanctioning Mugabe's regime with, among other things, a perfectly reasonable arms embargo in Zimbabwe despite Secretary General Mr. Ban-Ki Moon's astonishingly unsubtle comments may be the straw that broke the camel's back with regards to The West's cooperation with the global organization. It was probably a Tipping Point, pre-Olympics -- or, to be more accurate, pre-China's formal "coming out" as a Superpower -- in the organization's history (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment).

This essay, however, (strikingly well-written from the point of view of The Spectator) makes some strong arguments for a "League of Democracies") From The Spectator, 28 June 2008-07-12, The UN Is Not The Holy See:

"There is a misconception in this country and elsewhere that the UN is a Holy See for the peoples of the world. This is historically illiterate. The founding aim of the UN is to avoid great power conflict – which is why five nations have a veto over its actions, and the organization has, to repeat the old joke, the engine of a lawnmower and the brakes of a Rolls Royce.

“Two of the Security council’s permanent members – Russia and China – have no interest in setting a precedent whereby repression and the failure to hold free and fair elections are a trigger for other nations to intervene in the internal affairs of a county. In essence, they have no intention of drafting an international jurisprudence that would one day be used against them. It is no accident that the great humanitarian interventions of the post-Cold War era – Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999 and Sierra Leone in 2000 – had to be carved out outside the UN framework.

“If the UN will not act, and Britain and America cannot, some other mechanism for intervention is clearly needed. There have been frequent calls for the Southern African Development Community or the African Union to step in. But just as a British or American-led initiative could be misinterpreted as a colonial intervention, so an exclusively African-led military intervention is hard to envisage unless Africa is forced into doing something. The feelings of freedom-fighting solidarity that still exist between Mugabe and some African leaders are an obstruction to meaningful action. (It is worth noting that the South African populace seems to take a clear-eyed view of the Zimbabwe situation than the leaders. For all Thabo Mbeki’s moral cowardice, it was South African dockers who refused to unload Chinese arms shipments to Mugabe.)

“So what is required is something that encourages African countries to see this issue through the prism of democracy and human rights. The best long-term of achieving this proposed idea is currently championed by the Republican Presidential nominee, John McCain. This idea has been predictably denounced as a neocon plot to undermine the UN and allow America to do what it wants, when it wants. But the idea can actually be traced back to the Clinton Administration with Madeline Albright and Vaclav Havel’s push for a Community of Democracies would also – by definition – be a check on American power. At the moment, the US can bypass the UN – as it did over in Iraq – because it is clear that there are so many circumstances in which the UN simply will not act. But having invested large amounts of diplomatic capital in a new global organization on the premise that the collective moral judgments of democracies is superior to that of autocracies, it would be embarrassing in the extreme for America simply to ignore it. This proposal would lay the basis for a new, realist multilateralism and deserves a more intelligent hearing than it has thus far been granted.”

Any thoughts?