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The Bush administration's episodic reliance on the U.N. Security Council in recent years represents a reprieve for the United Nations system, not a recommitment to it. Proposals for a league (or »concert« or »alliance«) of democracies have steadily gained adherents in Washington policy salons in the past twenty years, among both conservatives with a deep distaste for global institutions and international law, and liberal interventionists frustrated by the thwarting of basic humanitarian values in the United Nations. The embrace of the league idea by a major-party presidential nominee coincides with Washington's new vocation as the world's prime promoter of democracy. While American presidents of both parties have embraced democracy with growing fervor in recent decades, the current administration's militancy in pressing democracy has perplexed traditional foreign policy realists at home and dismayed traditional allies abroad, not least because of its trail of double standards. Now seemingly divorced from the transnational human rights movement, Washington's promotion of democracy has become associated with military force, covert operations to effect »regime change,« and expansion of America's military bases and alliances. Liberal interventionists frankly acknowledge that a league of democracies would serve as an alternative forum to the balky Security Council for the approval of the use of force. More sensitive to the American public's disillusionment with overseas military interventions, the presidential candidate proposing the league makes no reference to its authorizing military force; but the speciousness of the public rationales confirms that its primary attraction is as a legitimator of forceful action. But the league concept erroneously assumes that similar systems for picking political leaders create a deep community of interest, while developing country democracies tend to see themselves as developing first and democracies second, and are more likely to view conflicts in other developing countries the way China does rather than the way America does. By joining the league, neither they nor the Europeans would gain leverage to restrain Washington from unilateral uses of force they consider inappropriate or illegal, giving them little reason to enlist. And the new entity would pose major risks-financially to countries' treasuries, and politically and legally to the hard-learned global legal regime restraining the use of force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]