Justice league.

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 of Russia and the entrepreneurial Communist regime of China have equal standing on the Security Council with the United States and Great Britain. It is a sign of God's sense of humor that France is the tie-breaker.

Now, opponents of a League of Democracies say that we can't leave the U.N. But this is a false choice. We could still hang a shingle at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza while working with other multilateral institutions. We didn't bolt the U.N.--nor did we seek its approval--when Bill Clinton used NATO to pound the Serbs. Indeed, NATO is the best argument for a League of Democracies. In fact, all we would need to do is add Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, Israel, and a few other countries to its roster and that is what it would become.

Critics of this idea say that the U.S. should not be in the business of deciding who is and isn't a democracy. They say that we shouldn't be shunning outsiders but co-opting them. They say that only the U.N. has legitimacy and we need to work through it, not around it. Well, in brief: We already decide who is and isn't a democracy via common sense and rafts of State Department reports. A union of democracies would co-opt nations upward. Co-opting nations in the U.N. means getting a mailbox to send checks to.

Ultimately, I think a League of Democracies, in some form, is inevitable if for no other reason than that we'll have little choice but to find new strategic tools. China, Russia, and much of the Muslim world see the U.N. chiefly as a means of tripping up the U.S. Eventually, we're going to need to look elsewhere, and that's going to be to our friends--who are democracies.