To save the United Nations from the irrelevance in which it now wallows, the next secretary general will require the concerted backing of the few powers that govern the security council.

The paradox is that the great powers who created the institution in the 1940s and recently treat it with a cavalier cynicism are now the ones who need it most, as does the rest of the world.

This is not about nostalgia for what was created after the second world war. That world has changed. We are no longer in the cold war. But it is carelessness of high order to assume that some mystical process will create a world while, in the meantime, the most powerful give license to some dangerous pathologies that have brought us to ruin in the past.

The resort to war over dialogue and diplomacy has reared its head again. Restraint has given way to calculated recklessness. Changing facts on the ground before talking now creates leverage, and that is why we see an unprecedented multiplication of centers of violence.…