The (Ex) Washington Realist

John McCain's recent op-ed, once again championing the notion of a "league of democracies", leaves me quite confused.

The Senator makes very powerful arguments about problems facing the world that no single nation is capable of solving, especially with regard to climate change. He writes, "The bottom line is that none of us can act as if our only concerns are within our own borders. We cannot define our national interests so narrowly that we fail to see how intimately our fate is bound up with that of the rest of humanity."

If that is the case, whether other governments are democratic, non-democratic, authoritarian or managed pluralist makes not one whit of difference. States will have to work together, won't they?

And again, what is lacking in this piece is why precisely democracies will somehow share common interests to pursue this global agenda but non-democracies will not. The collection of states he identifies--"Today, there is the powerful collective voice of the EU, India, Japan, Australia, Brazil, South Korea, South Africa, Turkey and Israel, to name just a few of the leading democracies. And there are the struggling young democracies, such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon ..." don't appear to me to really be the basis for this change. Certainly, the soaring rhetoric at the end--"It is the democracies of the world that will provide the pillars upon which we can and must build an enduring peace" is not supported by a SINGLE EXAMPLE IN THE TEXT of where this has played itself out. He says "The US and Europe must lead together" but that assumes that 1) the US and Europe can develop and maintain a common position, which in matters of climate change they have not and 2) that the US and Europe still represent the bulk of the global economy, which increasingly they do not.

I can also easily foresee situations where groups of states will come together on agreement on issues that cut across the democracy/non-democracy line--where China, India, Brazil and South Africa might be in greater alignment on a particular issue in opposition to Europe and the United States. Opposition to the Iraq war, Iran sanctions, Kosovo independence are three that immediately come to mind as past examples.

Presidential candidates--Obama, McCain and Clinton--like using this lofty and soaring rhetoric--but we do have to deal with the world as it is.