I mostly agree with the diagnosis; I’m not so confident about the cure. The core of Daalder and Lindsay’s argument is that the UN is structurally, and irremediably, incapable of addressing the crises which now plague the world—because those crises arise mostly within states rather than between them, and all too many of the UN’s members hold sovereignty in such regard, or at least profess to, that they will not permit the robust responses we need, whether military or political. It’s hard to argue with that proposition.

The UN has rhetorically accepted “the responsibility to protect,” but has barely lifted a finger to protect the people of Darfur. The chastened unilateralists of the Bush Administration have comported themselves with exemplary collegiality on Iran, conducting their policy on a matter of supreme importance through the Security Council; and they have been rewarded for their patience and forbearance with endless delay and irresolution.

And I agree as well that these problems are only barely susceptible to diplomatic finesse. A kinder, gentler administration in Washington—Bill Clinton’s, for example—would not have made much more headway in either of these cases. In neither case is alleged American bullying at issue. The same may be said for the mortifying failure of the new and supposedly strengthened Human Rights Council to single out any country save Israel for criticism. Had the U.S. sought a seat on the council, which it chose not to do, it might have managed to ward off the resolutions on Israel; but since much of Western Europe already sits on the new body, the addition of Washington would scarcely have increased the council’s willingness to censure Sudan, or Zimbabwe, or Uzbekistan.

Daalder and Lindsay are quite right in charging that the Security Council “institutionalizes the deficiencies of a great-power concert more readily than its benefits.” The problem seems to be recurrent. At the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco, President Harry Truman expressed the pious hope that competing ideological systems would not paralyze the institution. That, of course, was just what happened. The demise of one of those systems gave rise to the hope that the UN would finally operate as the muscular policeman it was meant to be. For a very brief moment, in the early 1990s, it did. And even after the peacekeeping catastrophes of Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda, Secretary General Kofi Annan did a great deal to revive faith in, and hope for, the UN. Yet now, much though the ideological contest of the Cold War has vanished into history, the Security Council is almost as divided as it was in the bad old days—and on the exact same lines: Russia and China versus the U.S. UK and France.

They are also, I think, right in claiming that the UN’s universal membership is both the source of its legitimacy and its “greatest curse.” The UN can not exclude members based on belief--including belief in the institution’s own founding ideals. Most of the world’s states do not actually believe in “the responsibility to protect,” whatever they publicly profess. Most do not share the Lockean view that sovereignty rests with the citizen, and is offered in a limited grant to the state. A truly representative human rights body is thus almost bound to fail, for the majority of the UN’s members do not accept the inalienability of individual rights.

Nevertheless, I only “mostly” agree with the diagnosis because, for all that, the UN is actually a more effective body than Daalder and Lindsay let on. I’m not referring to relatively non-controversial public goods like the inoculation of children and emergency relief and so on. I’m also thinking of peacekeeping and peacemaking. There are fewer civil wars in the world today than in decades past—and the wars tend to be shorter and less lethal—in part because of a circuit-breaking mechanism of which the UN forms the core. The horror of Congo would be vastly worse without UN peacekeeping troops; and absent the vast UN presence, the election just past would never have happened. Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burundi and other war-torn states have attained a tenuous peace thanks to UN intervention. The UN brokered an end to the war in Lebanon, and policed the cease-fire with its own peacekeeping force. So let’s at least acknowledge the value of the thing we propose to supplant.

Now for the cure. If it is indeed, true that the Security Council is divided between its three permanent democratic members and its two un-democratic ones, and that the countries most hostile to intervention in all its forms, including the merely rhetorical weapon of the human rights resolution, are the authoritarian ones, then doesn’t it stand to reason that a Concert of Democracies would succeed where the UN now fails? After all, Daalder and Lindsay argue, “Democracies understand that international peace and justice in the era of global politics rests on protecting the rights of individuals.”

Of course they do; that’s why the world’s democracies have demanded action in Darfur. Except, of course, that they haven’t. Editorial columnists across the democratic world have called for action; so have human rights groups. But states, by and large, haven’t. When, in the spring of 2005, Kofi Annan implored the Security Council to authorize a humanitarian intervention or a robust UN peacekeeping force, or even a joint force of UN and African Union soldiers, it wasn’t only the authoritarians who turned him down; it was the democrats. No one cared to breach Khartoum’s “sovereign” refusal to accept such a force. And while it is absolutely true that the U.S. and other Western states were far more prepared to impose tough sanctions about Sudan’s regime than were the African or Arab states on the council, there has been little cry for action from non-Western democracies. Genocide in places of no strategic significance tests the willingness of states to act altruistically; and democratic states, in this regard, turn out to be calculators of self-interest, just like authoritarian ones.

But this is too crude. We need to make a further distinction—between Western and non-Western democracies. Third World democracies like India view sovereignty in virtually the same absolutist terms as the autocracies do; and it’s no wonder, since they were all shaped by the experience of colonialism. Third World democracies do not, in general, judge the legitimacy of the world order according to the standards to which they hold their domestic order. Nor are they heirs to the universalism of the Enlightenment. It’s possible that, as Daalder and Lindsay speculate, membership in the Concert of Democracies will slowly habituate non-Western democracies to Western standards; but it’s scarcely inevitable.

What about strategic calculations? Would a Concert of Democracies do a better job of holding Iran to account? Why would, say, a Latin democracy like Brazil or Mexico worry about the dangers of non-proliferation as much as a Gulf sheikdom? The way in which states rank external threats has much less to do with their domestic order than with their neighborhood, or their position in the global structure of power. The U.S. fears terrorism because it is the chief fixation of the Islamists, while European countries have large and restive blocs of Islamic immigrants. But Saudi Arabia feels far more threatened by Islamists, and of course by Iran, than does, say, South Korea. You don’t have to be a hard-boiled realist to recognize this inherent—structural--limitation of such a body.

And I do think legitimacy will be a problem. Legitimacy is like charisma—an attribute that appears to belong to the entity in question, but is ultimately ascribed by others. That’s why any action undertaken by the Concert of Democracies would have more legitimacy than the identical action carried out by the U.S. alone. It’s not so easy to replace the legitimacy that comes with universal membership. The Concert will have only one member from the Middle East—Israel. What would happen if it intervened in Lebanon, as the UN just did? What about an intervention in a non-Middle Eastern Islamic state, like Sudan? The Concert would, in fact, intervene almost exclusively in the territory of non-members. The benevolence of the deed might be, let’s say, obscured, by anti-neo-colonial wrath.

And since I’ve argued—in the penultimate chapter of my book--that the exclusion of China and Russia would be a problem, I have to say that I’m not altogether convinced on this point either. Would the Concert of Democracies function merely as “a complement” to other bodies, rather than a substitute for them, as Daalder and Lindsay claim, and thus provoke little resentment from the excluded? This seems ever so slightly disingenuous. The Concert would absorb many of the key functions of the Security Council (though presumably the council would continue to exist, we would continue to serve on it, and God knows how the two organizations would operate in regard to one another). It aspires to shape a just and stable world order. China and Russia would view its creation as a hostile act. And in any case it’s hard to see how such a body could succeed absent China, the world’s great rising power.

Now that, as a theatre critic once put it, I’ve knocked everything but the chorus girl’s knees, I would like to say a few things in mitigation. In a nutshell: Do I have anything better to offer? Hardly. I do think the UN is a more effective body than Daalder and Lindsay do—but not a lot. I do think there’s room for improvement, especially if the U.S. plays a more responsible role—but not all that much room. And we need something: I believe, as do Daalder and Lindsay, that multilateral action must be embedded in formal, rule-bound bodies rather than conducted ad hoc. I think it’s right that democracies, in general, practice a more responsible foreign policy than autocracies do, and I also can imagine that an institution like the Concert could have the effect of promoting not just democratic values but Enlightenment values. And that would be a significant virtue in itself.

So okay, let’s give it a try. Let’s assemble a D-60 inside the UN, and see what happens. My expectations are lower than theirs. But the world would be better off if they were right, and I were wrong.