Cernig at Newshoggers has posted a critique of McCain’s proposal for a “league of democracies” to supplement the diminishing returns of the bloated United Nations. In his critique, however, Cernig embraces a classic strawman technique, ascribing a belief to McCain supporters that none of them actually embrace:

But here’s the rub – what happens when the League of Democracies tries to impose its authority on a non-democracy and the latter says it doesn’t recognise the authority of a body it hasn’t been invited to send representatives to and has no voice at?

We bomb them?

If Cernig were to step outside of his relentlessly partisan world (where nothing positive can ever be said about any Republican and no criticism can ever be tolerated of a Democrat except for being too weak in their anti-Republicanism) for a few moments, he might have time to learn the lesson that has to be constantly reinforced to generation after generation of foreign policy students — there are more tools in the foreign policy toolbox than just military force.

McCain’s proposal is specifically not an embrace of military force, in fact. His proposal is explicitly institutionalist, something that foreign policy liberals (note: the meaning of “liberal” in foreign policy terms has little if any relationship to the mean of “liberal” in American politics — another nuance that Cernig seems to have overlooked in his desire to blast Kevin Sullivan) have placed at the core of their strategy ever since the end of World War II. There is simply no basis for Cernig’s assumption that the organization would exist solely to authorize military attacks.

If we are ever to begin to reconstruct the Cold War-era consensus that was rent asunder by the ham-handed foreign policy of the Bush administration, critics from the left will need to stop exaggerating and misrepresenting those they disagree with and start engaging their actual arguments.