Newly chosen U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who takes up his post in January, will have a very full plate.
Quite aside from the crises that fill the daily news headlines, such as the unbearable and unending violence in Syria and Iraq, tensions in the South China Sea, and the streams of migrants, refugees and homeless people on an unprecedented scale across the planet, he will have to face an even more fundamental issue.
This arises from the fact that the United Nations as an institution now has to operate in conditions totally different from those in which it was founded. It remains, and is becoming more than ever, a indispensable forum in which the problems of a violent world can be addressed, but it has to do so while the very member nations it is meant to unite are under existential attack from within, while the boundaries delineating some of its 193 member states are blurring and even disappearing, and while sub-state authorities and non-state actors strut the world stage in increasing numbers.