Published in: New American, 01 April 2009

During last year's presidential campaign, Republican candidate John McCain turned heads when he stated: "We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact — a League of Democracies — that can harness the vast influence of the more than one hundred democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests."

McCain rightly received harsh criticism from pundits who claimed this was just another way to entangle the United States in future wars. These critics overlooked a small detail though. The "League of Democracies" promoted by McCain was simply a slight renaming of an idea explored by elite progressive internationalists. The Washington Post explains:
 

In 2006, [Professor G. John Ikenberry] and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School ... 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. [Emphasis added.]

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