The Foreign Service Journal, January 2009

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 37 sanctions on Iran as penalty for continuing its uranium en- richment program. Though seen in some quarters as a proposal to supplant the United Nations, he stressed that he intended the league to complement U.N. activities rather than replace them. On the Democratic Party side, some leading policy ex- perts favor a “Concert of Democracies,” which McCain’s plan resembles. This approach, too, sees a need for a for- mal structure uniting the world’s democracies and provid- ing a framework for them to act on crises such as Darfur or assist fellow democracies in responding to security or economic threats. In both cases, supporters of these organizations look to take a step further than the nearly decade-old Community of Democracies by providing stricter guidelines for mem- bership and taking more assertive collective action. Two supporters of the “concert” model, James Lindsay and Ivo Daalder, wrote in the January/February 2007 issue of The American Interest that a good starting point would be the bolstering of the U.N. democracy caucus “into a genuine and effective coalition— one whose members seek to de- velop common positions prior to important votes, just as regional groups of member states do now.” Yet the issue is a subject of some dispute among leading Democrats. CFR Senior Fellow Charles A. Kupchan, a National Se- curity Council official in the Clinton administration, writes in Foreign Affairs that such an organization “would expose the limits of the West’s power and legitimacy.” President-elect Barack Obama is on the record as sup- porting democracy programs. He told the Washington Post in March 2008 of his interest in starting a “Rapid Re- sponse Fund for young democracies and post-conflict so- cieties that will provide foreign aid, debt relief, technical assistance and investment packages that show the people of newly hopeful countries that democracy and peace de- liver, and the United States stands by them.” Speaking about the challenges posed by the Middle East, the CFR’s Steven Cook says: “Until policymakers F O C U S