I am very sorry to be coming in so late to this debate; I wanted to join it earlier in the week but simply could not. All the more so because predictably, as much as I respect Michael Lind, I disagree strongly with his characterization of traditional liberal internationalism and "new liberal internationalists" (he never makes clear how he would characterize us other than as neo-con fellow travelers.) In the first place, the liberal internationalism of Roosevelt and Truman believed both in having a concert of all great powers (the UN Security Council) and of democracies (NATO, the Marshall Plan, and ultimately the EU). They absolutely recognized the pragmatic necessity of talking to everyone, and they were right. But they also recognized that it was vital to develop institutions that would deepen cooperation among liberal democracies, both for strategic and moral reasons. That is precisely the position that John Ikenberry and I have taken with regard to our proposed concert of democracies -- we have made clear repeatedly that we would never want it in place of the UN but only in addition to. We also explicitly argued that it should not be a military alliance; indeed we proposed it as a much more informal alternative to a global NATO.

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