Great Idea: The League of Democracies

Jonah Goldberg rocks with his analysis of the problems of the UN and a proposed solution.

People want a goody-goody multinational organization that does nice things and solves bad problems. So, since the U.N. is the only outfit in that business, we keep dusting it off and patting it on the back after each of its innumerable and monumental failures.

One of the reasons it fails is that it's pretty much designed to. There is no vision, no set of shared values that truly unites the United Nations. You can't have a civil rights organization where Klansmen are welcomed as members; you can't have a softball team where half the players want to play basketball, and you can't have a global organization dedicated to the spread of human rights and democracy with nearly half the members representing barbaric, corrupt regimes.

And because the U.N. feels it must be "fair" to everybody, the worst abusers get to take turns determining policies on human rights and weapons proliferation. Right before the war, Iraq was set to co-chair the U.N. Commission on Disarmament - with Iran! And even now the U.N. Commission on Human Rights is chock-a-block with representatives of nations that treat their own citizens like piñatas.

My solution: Competition. Why not create a new multinational organization that has members who share common ideals and that isn't based on the antiquated assumptions of 50 years ago. In this League of Democracies, membership would be restricted to countries with democratic values and the rule of law. This wouldn't be the "West versus the rest" either. Japan, India, South Korea, South Africa and others could be members.

The question is, then, how do we determine who is qualified for membership? What level of representation and what level of human and economic rights are required for entree? To be continued...