The Federation Option

A Dream of Democratic Commonwealth from Kyiv to Vancouver

If I could apply for a United Nations passport tomorrow and become a citizen of the world, I would do it without hesitation.

This isn’t youthful idealism talking—I’m a federal employee approaching retirement, a homesteader in rural Utah, someone who’s spent decades watching the wheels of bureaucracy turn. I’ve earned my cynicism about institutions. And yet: the idea that an accident of birth should determine whether a human being lives in safety or dies in a desert, crossing an imaginary line drawn by dead men in rooms we’ll never see—that strikes me as barbaric. A relic of thinking that belongs in the last century, not this one.

We’ve globalized everything except human dignity. Capital flows freely across borders. Information moves at the speed of light. Supply chains span continents. Climate change doesn’t check passports. Pandemics don’t respect sovereignty. The problems of the 21st century are planetary in scope, but our political institutions remain stubbornly national, fragmented, inadequate.

So let me offer you a dream. Not a prediction—I’m not that confident. But a possibility. A trajectory that current events suggest is more plausible than it might seem.

Imagine a democratic commonwealth stretching from Kyiv to Vancouver. From Ukraine’s eastern border to British Columbia’s Pacific coast. Not an empire. Not a superstate. Something new: a voluntary association of sovereign democracies choosing coordination because it works better than the alternatives.

The Arc of Cooperation

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme—and there’s a melody running through the last century that sounds like humanity slowly, painfully, learning to work together at larger scales.

The League of Nations was the first attempt. Born from the carnage of World War I, it represented something unprecedented: the idea that sovereign nations could voluntarily coordinate to prevent war. It failed, of course—hobbled by the absence of the United States (which refused to join its own president’s creation), lacking enforcement mechanisms, ultimately powerless to stop the slide toward a second global catastrophe. But the failure mattered less than the precedent. The idea was planted: nations could choose cooperation over competition.

The United Nations learned from the League’s mistakes. It added a Security Council with real power, peacekeeping forces, a whole architecture of international law. It’s frustrating, unwieldy, hamstrung by great-power vetoes and the fundamental tension between sovereignty and collective action. But it works. Imperfectly, maddeningly, but it’s held for eighty years. Smallpox is gone. Wars between major powers have been avoided. International norms—however often violated—exist.

The European Union went further. What started as a coal and steel agreement between former enemies evolved into something remarkable: twenty-seven nations sharing courts, currency, free movement of people, coordinated economic policy. It’s bureaucratic and maddening. It moves slowly. Brussels generates complaints the way a furnace generates heat. But consider what it accomplished: France and Germany, which spent centuries slaughtering each other’s young men in industrial quantities, now debate agricultural subsidies and banking regulations. War between EU members has become literally unthinkable. That’s not nothing. That’s a miracle disguised as paperwork.

Each iteration learned from the last. Each expanded the circle of cooperation a little wider, made the bonds a little stronger. The pattern suggests the next step.

The Pieces in Motion

Pay attention to what’s happening right now, and you’ll see the outlines of something new taking shape.

American reliability is collapsing. This isn’t partisan commentary—it’s observable fact. Allies who spent decades operating under the American security umbrella are watching that umbrella wobble. NATO members are being told, in so many words, that the guarantees they’ve relied on may not hold. European leaders are openly discussing “strategic autonomy” and “post-American security architecture.” The transatlantic alliance that defined the post-WWII order is fraying.

Europe is stepping up. Defense spending is surging. Joint procurement programs are expanding. The EU just released proposals for hundreds of billions in defense investment. Germany, after decades of military minimalism, is rearming. Not because Europeans suddenly became militaristic, but because they’re being forced to contemplate a world where they can’t rely on Washington.

Ukraine is proving something important. A smaller nation, technologically sophisticated and deeply motivated, can hold off a much larger aggressor. Ukrainian innovation in drone warfare, electronic systems, and battlefield adaptation is essentially live-testing the future of defense. Europe is funding this R&D through necessity. Ukraine is becoming Europe’s military-technology incubator, battle-testing systems that NATO will eventually adopt. The relationship isn’t charity—it’s partnership.

Canada is discovering common cause. Here’s something that gets overlooked: Canada and Ukraine have remarkably similar strategic situations. Both face aggressive neighbors who have made territorial claims. Both are being subjected to economic coercion and sovereignty threats. Both are democracies trying to maintain independence against larger, more powerful states willing to use pressure tactics. Prime Minister Carney’s government has been building deep ties with Kyiv—not just aid packages, but joint production agreements, security partnerships, technology sharing. This isn’t sentimentality. It’s strategic logic. Countries facing similar threats naturally find each other.

The UK needs a role. Post-Brexit Britain has been searching for its place in the world. It’s a nuclear power with substantial military capability, a major financial center, a democracy with deep cultural ties to both Europe and North America. It can’t rejoin the EU politically, but it can participate in a broader security and economic framework. The need is mutual.

What Commonwealth Could Look Like

So imagine it: a democratic bloc stretching from Ukraine’s border with Russia to Canada’s Pacific coast. What would hold it together?

Shared values as the membership criterion. Not geography, not ethnicity, not historical accident—but commitment to democratic governance, rule of law, human rights, and peaceful resolution of disputes. The entrance requirement isn’t where you are on a map. It’s what kind of society you’re building.

Free movement of people. The EU proved this works. Borders remain for administration, but crossing them becomes routine rather than traumatic. A Ukrainian engineer can work in Dublin. A Canadian teacher can retire in Portugal. A British programmer can take a job in Kyiv. Human talent flows where it’s needed, not where accidents of birth trapped it.

Coordinated defense. Not a single military, but interoperable forces with shared doctrine, joint procurement, mutual defense commitments. An attack on any member is an attack on all—not because a treaty says so, but because the integration makes it impossible to separate. Ukrainian innovation, European industrial capacity, British naval tradition, Canadian arctic expertise: each brings something to the table.

Economic integration. Shared standards, reduced trade barriers, coordinated industrial policy. European capital funding Ukrainian reconstruction. Canadian resources flowing to European markets. British financial services lubricating the whole system. Not a single currency necessarily, but deep enough coordination that economic coercion by outside powers becomes ineffective.

Climate cooperation. This is the civilizational challenge of our century, and it cannot be solved by nations acting alone. A commonwealth spanning the northern hemisphere could coordinate energy transition, share green technology, implement carbon pricing that doesn’t just shift pollution elsewhere. The geographic spread—from Ukraine’s agricultural lands to Canada’s forests to Europe’s renewable energy zones—offers complementary assets.

Why Star Trek Matters

This is going to sound frivolous, but bear with me: the best model for what I’m describing already exists in popular culture, and it’s the United Federation of Planets.

Not the technology—no one’s promising replicators and warp drive. The political philosophy. Gene Roddenberry imagined something specific: sovereign worlds choosing cooperation because it serves everyone, rather than empire imposing order from above. The Federation isn’t the Galactic Empire. It doesn’t conquer member worlds or impose uniformity. It’s a framework for coordination among diverse societies that retain their distinct cultures and governance structures.

The Prime Directive—the rule against interfering in less-developed civilizations—gets all the attention, but the really radical idea is simpler: that cooperation can be chosen rather than coerced. That mutual benefit can replace mutual predation. That the strong don’t have to dominate the weak.

The twentieth century offered two models for international order: empire (one power dominates and imposes order) and nationalism (hard borders, zero-sum competition, “my country first”). Both are failing. Empire is failing because America is proving an unreliable hegemon, and because even reliable hegemony is inherently unstable—the center cannot hold forever. Nationalism is failing because the problems are bigger than nations.

The Federation model offers a third way: commonwealth. Sovereign entities choosing coordination because it works better. Not imposed from above, not fragmented into competing tribes. Democratic, voluntary, expansible.

Scaling Cooperation

Here’s something I know from experience: this model works at every scale.

In my corner of rural Utah, about a dozen households have formed what we call “the Commune”—not in any ideological sense, just a mutual aid network. We share tools, labor, expertise. Someone has a tractor; someone else knows plumbing; someone else has medical training. We help each other with harvests, repairs, emergencies. No formal structure. No coercion. Just people recognizing that cooperation serves everyone better than isolation.

The members span the political spectrum. We disagree about plenty. But we’ve found that when you’re actually working together—when someone’s helping you fix your roof or you’re helping them process a deer—the abstractions that divide us matter less than the concrete reality of shared work and mutual support. Cooperation isn’t ideological. It’s practical.

The same principle scales up. The EU works despite ideological diversity among member states because the practical benefits of coordination outweigh the costs of going it alone. The same would be true of a broader commonwealth. You don’t need unanimity on every issue. You need sufficient shared interest in the cooperative framework itself.

A Decade, Maybe Two

I’m not predicting this will happen. I’m suggesting it could, and that the pieces are already moving.

The timeline I imagine is roughly a decade for the core structure to emerge, another decade for it to mature into something stable. By 2035 or 2040, we could see a formal framework linking the EU, Ukraine, the UK, Canada, and potentially others—Iceland, Norway, perhaps some Pacific democracies—in something more integrated than a traditional alliance but less centralized than a federal superstate.

What would accelerate this? Continued American unreliability. Successful Ukrainian defense and reconstruction. Climate disasters that make coordination obviously necessary. A generation that grew up with the internet and finds borders increasingly arbitrary.

What would prevent it? Nationalist backlash. Economic crisis that turns countries inward. Russian or Chinese success in fragmenting the democratic world. Simple inertia—the tendency of institutions to persist even when they no longer serve.

The outcome isn’t determined. It’s contested. That’s why it matters to articulate the vision: we’re not just fighting against authoritarianism, against corruption, against the forces that would drag us backward. We’re fighting for something. A future where humanity’s cooperative capacity matches the scale of humanity’s problems.

Citizenship in the World That’s Coming

I started with a confession: I would trade my American passport for a world passport tomorrow. That’s not because I hate America—I’ve given decades of my life to federal service. It’s because I love humanity more than I love any particular flag, and because I believe the structures we’ve built are too small for the challenges we face.

The dream of democratic commonwealth—from Kyiv to Vancouver, with room for anyone who shares the values—is not utopia. It’s not a promise that everything will be perfect. Bureaucracies will still frustrate. Politicians will still disappoint. Humans will still be humans.

But it’s a framework that could expand the realm of the possible. More people with a real shot at flourishing. More cooperation on the problems that threaten us all. More movement toward the better angels of our nature.

The League of Nations was followed by the United Nations. The United Nations coexists with the European Union. The pattern points toward something larger.

Maybe our grandchildren’s grandchildren will look back at this moment—at the stumbling, painful, contested emergence of global democratic cooperation—and see it as we see the founding of the UN: imperfect, incomplete, but a step on the path toward something better.

That’s worth fighting for.

Live long and prosper.