League of democracies solves

The club approach to multilateralism posits that the most promising foundation for global order and cooperation is not UN universalism but a league of advanced market democracies committed to an open, liberal, and rules-based international system. It assumes that established democracies constitute a distinctive “security community” dedicated to shared political and economic principles—namely, support for representative and accountable governance, open markets, and the rule of law at home and abroad—and among whom armed conflict has become inconceivable.34 Such collective identity commitments encourage these countries to define their national interests and policy preferences similarly, narrowing the range of potential disputes and increasing the prospect that any disagreements that do arise are resolved through diplomatic consultation and mutual adjustment. Grounded in liberal internationalism, the club approach promises to advance both the material ends and aspirational purposes of its democratic members. The heyday of the club approach was during the Cold War, when the United States sought to consolidate an alliance of like-minded democracies as the core of its grand strategy to contain the Soviet Union. This was not the orientation the Roosevelt administration had anticipated during World War II. Indeed, U.S. postwar planners laid the groundwork for a new structure of international peace and security based on the UN, complemented by new multilateral bodies to manage the world economy, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and an envisioned international trade organization.35 To be sure, Roosevelt did not envision a pure system of collective security; he understood that the victor powers must jointly guarantee the postwar order. Still, he expressed confidence that the creation of the UN would “spell an end to the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.”36 Unfortunately, the Soviet Union found this universalist vision—and the priority it accorded self-determination over spheres of influence—deeply threatening. As Moscow tightened its grip over Eastern Europe, the United States deferred its “one world” dreams to build a narrower “free world” community capable of deterring Soviet aggression and subversion. Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, signaled this dramatic reorientation in U.S. grand strategy seventy-six years ago, in response to perceived Soviet designs in the eastern Mediterranean, Moscow’s hardening of control in Eastern Europe, and communist efforts to seize power in war-ravaged European democracies. Enunciating the doctrine that would bear his name, Truman committed the United States to a sweeping new global mission: “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”37 The United States bolstered Western Europe economically, politically, and, with the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, militarily. Of course, actual U.S. Cold War policy often fell far short of these high-minded ideals, particularly in the (post)colonial and developing worlds, where the United States repeatedly aligned with right-wing despots who proved their anticommunist bona fides.38 As the Manichean logic of containment took hold, the so-called free world came to include many countries where actual freedom was in short supply. Despite this hypocrisy, successive U.S. administrations continued to treat solidarity among market democracies as the core of U.S. grand strategy. When the bipolar confrontation suddenly ended, many in the U.S. foreign policy establishment dreamed that this community would expand gradually to encompass the entire world.39 In 2000, then U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Polish foreign minister Bronisaw Geremek cosponsored a ministerial conference in Warsaw where delegations from 106 nations signed the Warsaw Declaration, titled “Towards a Community of Democracies,” pledging cooperation in advancing democratic governance within their own countries and helping consolidate fragile transitions from authoritarian or totalitarian rule.40 These visions of a democratic renaissance have since been dashed by a combination of resurgent geopolitical rivalry pitting China and Russia against the West, the retreat of democracy in many other parts of the world, and the erosion of democratic norms within the United States itself. For proponents of the club approach to international order, however, these trends merely warrant a doubling down on the ties that bind established democracies. In the July/August 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs, foreign policy experts Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay assert that unifying the world’s community of advanced democracies is the only way to rebuild an international system based on “the rule of law rather than the law of the jungle.”41 This is not a new argument—Daalder and Lindsay have been making it since at least 2004.42 In 2008, the U.S. State Department policy planning staff proposed establishing a strategic dialogue among ten leading democracies.43 The vision of a league of democracies goes even further back, however. It draws on the late eighteenth-century writings of Immanuel Kant, who saw a confederation of liberal republics as one precondition for “perpetual peace,” as well as on the thinking of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, who was convinced that enduring international stability after World War I would require a majority of nations (especially great powers) to be democracies.44 According to its current champions, a league of democracies offers open societies the best chance to defend themselves against authoritarian and totalitarian antagonists and to reinforce rules of international conduct conducive to an open world. In A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, Princeton political theorist G. John Ikenberry posits that the fate of the liberal international order depends on whether democracies stand together or apart in confronting their common security, political, and economic dilemmas.45 Among U.S. think tanks, the Atlantic Council houses the most vocal supporters of the club approach, expressed through the creation in 2018 of the Democratic Order Task Force. The next year, that body published the “Declaration of Principles for Freedom, Prosperity, and Peace.” Its seven pillars included the right of all peoples to freedom and justice; democracy and self-determination; peace and security from aggression, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction; free markets and equal opportunity; an open and healthy planet; external assistance against oppression; and collective action to safeguard these rights.46 Subsequently, two Atlantic Council scholars, Ash Jain and Matthew Kroenig, proposed creating “a formal Democracies Ten” (or D-10) by enlarging the current G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to include Australia, South Korea, and the European Union (EU, which already participates in the G7 process). The resulting body would serve as a steering committee “aimed at fostering strategic alignment and coordinated action among a group of like-minded, influential democracies to advance a rules-based democratic order.” The authors held out the possibility that this club could open its doors to other major democracies that are both “strategically likeminded” and demonstrate a “capacity for global influence.”47 Potential candidates could even include developing countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa, provided that “concerns over like-mindedness”—not least in their attitudes toward China and Russia—“can be overcome.”48 Well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden had signaled his own affinity with the club approach. After just two months in office, he proclaimed the “battle between the utility of democracies . . . and autocracies” to be the defining struggle of the twenty-first century.49 A key factor behind this stance was growing alarm in Washington over the perceived failure of the United States’ decades-long, bipartisan effort to persuade Beijing to behave as a “responsible stakeholder.”50 Biden pledged to revive Western solidarity as a bulwark against Chinese and Russian efforts to subvert free societies and upend the rules-based international order. Indeed, this became a leitmotif of the G7, NATO, and U.S.-EU summits in June 2021.51 The U.S. president and UK prime minister Boris Johnson underscored this message by releasing a so-called New Atlantic Charter, modeled after the original that Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had issued in August 1941 shortly before the U.S. entry into World War II.52 Biden warmed to this theme in his first UNGA speech in September 2021. “We stand . . . at an inflection point in history,” he declared. “The future will belong to those who give their people the ability to breathe free, not those who seek to suffocate their people with an iron hand.”53 This same conviction informed the administration’s Summit for Democracy in December 2021, intended to rally and enhance the resilience of free societies confronting a slew of internal and external threats.54 Adversaries reinforced Biden’s gravitation to the club model. In early February 2022, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a bilateral partnership with “no limits”—a club of their own, in effect, intended to make the world safe for autocracy. Their global vision was deeply at odds with the U.S. notion of an open, liberal, rule-bound international system.55 Not three weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. The conflict, pitting an authoritarian aggressor against an (admittedly imperfect) democracy, confirmed Biden’s conviction that the globe was splitting into two blocs, much as Soviet aggression and U.S. responses to it had done three quarters of a century before.56 Speaking in Warsaw soon after, the president framed Ukraine as part of a larger “battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”57 The Russian invasion indeed galvanized the community of advanced market democracies, reinvigorating a transatlantic alliance that French President Emmanuel Macron had pronounced “brain dead” only three years earlier.58 Putin’s brazen effort to subjugate Ukraine reminded the citizens of free societies of the foundational values underpinning their security community—and how much they could lose if they allowed Russian aggression to go unchecked and unpunished. Over the ensuing year, the Biden administration has led a unified Western response to Russian aggression, coordinating the stances of other democracies, keeping NATO’s thirty members united in resisting Russian demands and intimidation, orchestrating punishing economic sanctions, supporting the forward deployment of allied troops, and engineering the alliance’s imminent enlargement to add Sweden and Finland. To Daalder and Lindsay, the Ukraine war reaffirms the imperative of consolidating the free world’s democratic core. Like Jain and Kroenig, they propose expanding the G7, but with a couple of tweaks: tiny New Zealand (population 5 million) would also join and, of greater significance, NATO would gain “a seat at the table for all security-related discussions.” This notional “G-12”— encompassing nearly one billion people and accounting for more than 60 percent of global gross domestic product and military spending—would promote ongoing policy coordination across a range of foreign, security, economic, and global spheres, from resisting Russian and Chinese aggression to combating climate change, preparing for pandemics, halting nuclear proliferation, and harmonizing approaches to trade and investment. “Establishing a G-12,” the authors declare, “is the last best hope to reinvigorate the rules-based order.”59