FOR the past four years senior officials from a group of leading democracies, calling themselves the "DIO"，have quietly been meeting once or twice a year to discuss how to co-ordinate strategies to advance the liberal world order. Foreign ministry policy-planners and a few think-tank types would discuss responses to Russia, China, North Korea, Iran—but largely below the radar, so as not to be seen as a cabal of the "old West". The idea has been to enhance co-operation among "a small number of strategically like-minded and highly capable states", as Ash Jain, a former member of the State Department's policy-planning staff, put it in a working paper in 2013.
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