It is tempting to dismiss this week's Millennium Summit at the United Nations as pure hype. After all, it declared its aim was the eradication of poverty and war in the 21st century. Good luck. Yet, if the U.N. and its members do not hold such ambitions, then there is very little hope for our world in the century to come.

This week's gathering aimed to redefine and restructure the U.N. to make it better able to confront the challenges of the next century. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan proposed objectives for the world body in a report to the General Assembly in April. It sets the following goals for 2015: to ensure that all children complete primary education; to halve from 20 percent to 10 percent the proportion of the world's population that does not have access to safe drinking water; to halve to 11 percent the number of people living on less than $1 a day; to halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS. The report calls for "benevolent globalization" and aims at ensuring that the poor are not left behind as the world embraces the information revolution.

Any one of those would be a tremendous achievement. Taken together, they are fantastic. Mr. Annan acknowledges the magnitude of the challenges, but he is undaunted nevertheless. "Dreams are not Utopian," he explained before the summit opened. "We have the means and the capacity to deal with our problems, if only we can find the political will."