Brooks on the League

From David Brooks' insightful column yesterday about the decline in executive authority compared with decades past.

The answer is that, in the late 1940s, global power was concentrated. The victory over fascism meant the mantle of global leadership rested firmly on the Atlantic alliance. The United States accounted for roughly half of world economic output. Within the U.S., power was wielded by a small, bipartisan, permanent governing class — men like Acheson, W. Averell Harriman, John McCloy and Robert Lovett.

Today power is dispersed. There is no permanent bipartisan governing class in Washington. Globally, power has gone multipolar, with the rise of China, India, Brazil and the rest.

As a result, none of today's problems can easily be solved by one or even a handful of strong-willed leaders, which frustrates voters accustomed to more able executives. Brooks lists the many industrial-country leaders whose approval ratings are in the toilet, not just Bush but Gordon Brown, Yasuo Fukuda, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and Silvio Berlusconi.

All that seems right on. His solution, however, does not: the League of Democracies proposed by (among others) John McCain, effectively a China-less and Russia-less end run around the UN Security Council. The logic for such a plan is contradicted by Brooks' analysis in the column's first 600 words. As he notes, the world is multi-polar, and today's problems are such that everyone needs to be on board to solve them. We can't simply pretend that China and Russia don't have the power that they do. What use is a League of Democracies on nuclear proliferation if Russia can't be involved? How can you solve global warming or establish a more comprehensive international trade regime if China doesn't have a voice?

Nor am I convinced that a League of Democracies would make solving problems like Darfur and Iran a lot easier. Countries threatened by the West would rush to take cover under the Chinese/Russian umbrella (which the two powers, thumbed in the eye by the mere creation of the League, would be even more ready to provide than today), and we would probably find ourselves risking more Cold War-type escalations. As such, a League would inevitably lead to more antagonistic relations with between the US-led West and both nations mentioned above, which undoes a truly the historic achievement of the last 20 years: the absence of great-power animosity.