It’s no good trying to sugarcoat the troubled history of the United Nations. This paradoxical organization emerged from the ruined cities and gas chambers of World War II with the explicit goal of making sure that no destructive conflict on that scale would ever happen again. It succeeded, at the very least, in damping down the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union enough that it never escalated into civilization-ending apocalypse. How much the U.N. has really accomplished in subsequent decades to manage a world of constant disorder, worsening inequality and impending ecological collapse is very much open to doubt. It began as an unstable blend of wildly ambitious idealism, great-power cynicism and mind-numbing bureaucracy, and that combination has defined it ever since.

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