Relevance and Realities: Washington’s Flirtation with a League of Democracies JEFFREY LAURENTI I n the fall of 2003, six months after the United States broke with the United Nations Security Council and launched its invasion of Iraq, un Secretary-General Kofi Annan gloomily warned the world’s leaders gath­ered before him that they had»come to a fork in the road.« An interna­tional order built on»rules to govern international behavior« and»a net­work of institutions, with the United Nations at its center« had been shaken to its foundations. Some saw an»Abyssinia moment,« recalling the»rigor mortis« of the League of Nations in the face of Axis ambitions in the 1930s. Five years later, the sense of crisis has somewhat eased. George Bush’s »Abyssinia« – the effort to convert Iraq into a us ally or client – has, even at home, discredited the project for a new American century that his na­tional security team had worked so feverishly to realize. The Security Council machinery was cranked up to deliver patchwork responses to crises in Sudan, Lebanon, and Iran that America’s reigning conservatives had to acknowledge they could not control or resolve with just an ally or two. The international order conceived in a rather different world by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s generation has demonstrated its continuing rel­evance, to the dismay of its detractors. But this represents a reprieve for the United Nations system, not a re­commitment to it. Multiplying stresses between the Anglo-Americans and the Russians – on whose comity the un security system still depends – are narrowing the range of crises on which Security Council members can agree on a common global interest and course of action. Among the mor­ally minded in powerful Western countries, frustration is mounting with a system in which the rulers of developing countries or rival powers thwart their resolute sense of duty in defense of basic humanitarian values. The campaign debate leading up to the potentially fateful 2008 presi­dential election in the United States – the first in more than half a century in which no sitting president or vice-president is on the ballot – has un­derscored this uncertainty. One presidential candidate has called for the ipg 4/2008 Laurenti, League of Democracies 41