The death of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as the United Nations stands helpless during a war in Europe, is a moment to reflect on her idea for a league of democracies. As President Clinton’s UN ambassador, Albright had come to appreciate the UN’s institutional flaws. Toward the end of her career she pressed the idea of creating a new world body limited to the democratic nations.

There was much on which we didn’t agree with Albright. Yet we can imagine that she would have been more supportive than our current UN envoy has been of, say, Ukraine as it sought to make its case before the Security Council. When Ukraine went to the Security Council about a prima facie violation of the UN charter, in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine’s envoy discovered that Russia was chairing the hearing.

Ukraine then levied its claim that Russia wasn’t even properly a  member of the UN. It got zilch in the way of support from President Biden and Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield. That wouldn’t have been possible in a world body limited to democracies, because Russia isn’t a democracy in any real sense of the word. It’s the kind of situation that we can imagine Madeleine Albright would have appreciated.

We understand that she was at the UN beginning in 1993, less than two years after Russia connived to snatch the seat that the United Nations Charter still lists as belonging to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. She could have written herself into glory if she had fought in the 1990s the battle to reserve the seat held by once-existing Soviet Union to a genuinely democratic country.

No wonder, though, that Albright came to see the wisdom of a new global body of democratic member-nations. Democracy, she saw, was not merely “another form of government,” but a “powerful generator of international security and peace.” The group she helped launch in 2000, the Community of Democracies, strikes us as a potential route to exiting the catastrophe of the United Nations.

As early as 2001, the conservative columnist William Safire saw the potential for Albright’s Community of Democracies as a “creative reaction to the domination of the U.N. by dictatorships, oligarchies, kakistocracies and rogue nations.” Though Safire rightly doubted the need for “another multinational bureaucracy,” he thought a lean C.D., “financed on a shoestring,” could “set an example to the bloated U.N.”

Albright’s Community of Democracies is still finding its feet as a global body. The group “has an essential role to play,” Albright said in 2017, bringing “together democracies new and old to share best practices and help each other meet common challenges.” That might be a little light on substance. Yet the group remains dedicated to Albright’s view that “Governments that are publicly accountable rarely start wars.” 

We are among those who see the United Nations as what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called a “dangerous place.” It is institutionally irreparable and inherently in conflict with our own Constitution. All the more can one appreciate the first step away from the UN that Albright’s Community of Democracies represents. The Community might yet prove a fitting monument to one of the Democratic Party’s doughtiest diplomats.