One truth about John McCain's foreign policy views: He's no slave to fashion. Opposed Reagan on deploying Marines to Lebanon in 1983. Lobbied the Bush White House for last year's troop “surge” in Iraq. The NYT tried yesterday to classify McCain's foreign policy viewpoints based on his mix of “realist” and “neo-con” advisers, but was ultimately frustrated.

The post-modernist way that political labels are viewed these days is partly responsible. “Liberals” seldom use the label when running for national office, “conservative” is almost always inadequate in describing a candidate, unless there's a clear context in either social, fiscal or foreign policy. The Atlantic Monthly's Jonathan Rauch calls McCain “Mr. Conservative,” but then goes on to qualify him as a Burkean traditionalist, rather than an ambitious foreign policy revolutionary.

McCain does seem to like the idea of cheering on the spread of democracy, however. For years he's been associated with the International Republican Institute, one of the NGOs funded by Congress to advance democracy in formerly Communist countries. And now, in his recent foreign policy discourse in Los Angeles, he has proposed a League of Democracies.

The need for the League arises because, says McCain:

…we must also lead by attracting others to our cause, by demonstrating once again the virtues of freedom and democracy, by defending the rules of international civilized society and by creating the new international institutions necessary to advance the peace and freedoms we cherish. Perhaps above all, leadership in today's world means accepting and fulfilling our responsibilities as a great nation.

One of those responsibilities is to be a good and reliable ally to our fellow democracies. We cannot build an enduring peace based on freedom by ourselves, and we do not want to. We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact — a League of Democracies — that can harness the vast influence of the more than one hundred democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests…

How different are these sentiments from the ideas of Woodrow Wilson, FDR or even Madeleine Albright? Albright started up a Community of Democracies just eight years ago in order to have a kind of forum of like-minded democratic leaders. It appears to still exist, but has scarcely been heard from in recent years.

The idea of mobilizing democracies is a lofty ambition but usually works better on paper and in speeches than in reality. George W. Bush began his Presidency without such ambitions but, by the time of his second Inaugural had become a convert. Presidential candidates are supposed to have a “vision,” but the American electorate might be content with more modest “conservative” expectations. As the curmudgeonly Pat Buchanan puts it, “What has the Bush-McCain democracy crusade produced, save electoral victories for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas? And if we dump the sultan of Oman, President Mubarak, and the king of Saudi Arabia, who does McCain think will replace them?”