Strategic Panorama 2009 - 2010 - IEEE

Florentino Portero Rodríguez
experience of working together that are of great importance in conducting
missions not covered by the organisation.
A global world requires security links throughout the planet. The Alliance
considered the possibility of being global, of becoming the platform on
which to build an alliance of democratic states willing to cooperate in defending
the principles and values established in the Treaty of Washington, the
democratic heritage, but many member states have rejected this proposal,
not always for the same reasons. They have chosen freely to limit the
Alliance to a regional sphere, even though the military operations in progress—on
which prestige and very existence hinge—are conducted many
kilometres away. The United States has been strengthening its security links
with the major democratic states, particularly those of the India-Pacific area.
The concept of League of Democracies has recently begun to be used in
both academic and political circles as an alternative to NATO. Nobody has
succeeding in developing it, but some of its characteristics are patently
obvious. While a great alliance of western nations, with the sole exception
of Turkey, was organised during the Cold War to defend western values and
interests, this perspective is now pointless, it has become anachronistic.
On the one hand problems are global and require actors who are present in
different parts of the world. On the other, values once considered exclusive
to the western world are no longer owing to the expansion and espousal of
democracy across the world. Democracy is not the expression of a particular
culture, as Islamists think; rather, it is a system for settling conflicts that
is based on universal values. The League of Democracies is, at the least, a
platform of democracies which share common values and interests and are
prepared to fight for them as the basis for organising alliances of the willing
to settle specific crises. Unlike NATO the League is not a treaty-based organisation
with a permanent headquarters. On the contrary, it is a network of
security links, some multilateral others bilateral, which provide the legal and
diplomatic basis for organising joint missions. Each crisis has a particular
geography and set of interests, and each crisis thus determines the number
of states affected and the willingness of their governments.
It is just as evident to the US elites that they already live in the framework
of a vague League of Democracies as it is that the Atlantic Alliance
is a Cold War institution. How it develops depends on them, on the clarity
of their strategic vision and on their diplomacy’s skills at weaving common
interests which add stability to security links. The European states,
not the Union, are part of this design. Willingness to participate depends
on those states. There is no doubt that the two great European powers,
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