New ideas are always being demanded from our politicians, rarely delivered by them, and rarely sensible when they are unexpectedly produced. So there is good reason to welcome the proposal from Rudy Giuliani, in his Margaret Thatcher lecture to the Atlantic Bridge conference in London, that NATO be expanded to include India, Israel, Japan, Australia, and Singapore. New Western institutions are needed — and existing ones should be updated — to meet the new and more diverse security challenges of the post–Cold War world. U.S. national security will rest in large part on getting reliable cooperation from alliances old and new. And presidential candidates should be judged on their thinking about such matters. After all, the American president is still the leader of a (much larger) free world.

Giuliani’s proposal seeks to answer two problems: first, how to deal with a fractious and unfriendly United Nations; second, how to extend NATO into “out of area” missions effectively (since few of the most serious threats to U.S. security come from Europe). His expanded NATO would become, in effect, the diplomatic and security expression of the entire Western world, girdling the globe eastward from New York to San Francisco. Because it would be composed exclusively of democratic states, it would be a potential rival to the U.N., and thus morally influential within the “world body.” And its size and military power would deter any threat to its members while making it the arbiter of other nations’ conflicts. But is it an Atlantic bridge too far?

Australia, Singapore, and Japan would probably join after some debate. But major European members of NATO are likely to resist Israel’s joining, on the grounds that this would set them at odds with the Arab and Islamic worlds. Israel herself would probably conclude that NATO membership came at too high a cost in submitting vital national-security decisions to alliance consultation. And India, though she has moved far from her third-world identity toward strategic cooperation with the U.S., might balk at formal membership in the preeminent Western “club.”

A President Giuliani might get better results by solving his two problems separately. He could push strongly for a much more effective Community of Democracies. The present CD, established at Warsaw in 2000, does useful but modest work, generally supporting NGOs that promote democracy. So far, however, the idea that it would form a powerful “Democracy Caucus” at the U.N. has yielded meager results. If the next U.S. president concludes that such a large and diverse body will never wage effective diplomacy, he might seek to create a smaller and more cohesive one, including the nations named by Giuliani. Unless the U.S. is going to leave the U.N. — which looks highly unlikely — we need to build a coalition of reliable allies there. Giuliani deserves credit for dealing seriously with this.

In solving his second problem — security outside Europe — Giuliani rightly began with NATO. After all, the alliance is currently fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. A reliable worldwide NATO would be an ideal outcome. But even if the problems listed above can be overcome — and over time they well might — NATO itself looks increasingly unreliable as a serious military contender. European NATO members spend little on defense; they impose semi-pacifist rules of engagement on their soldiers even in combat situations; and they would rather devote scarce military resources to fantasies of a purely European defense force than to serious NATO purposes. America’s next president should begin his term of office by demanding a far stronger European commitment to the alliance.

If that fails, or “succeeds” inadequately, the next step will be to create a parallel global military alliance consisting of the U.S., other NATO members that take defense seriously (Britain, Turkey, Poland), and India, Australia, Japan, Israel, Singapore, and others. NATO would not be disbanded, merely downgraded in the eyes of Washington. Such a strategy might even jolt NATO’s weak sisters into a more serious military posture — and perhaps over time the two alliances would merge. For Giuliani’s essential strategic vision is correct. All he need remember is Bacon’s insight that “all rising is by a winding stair.”