The United Nations, international officials sometimes joke, is always in crisis. Since its inception in 1945, the organization has had to navigate deep geopolitical tensions, devastating humanitarian disasters, and periodic budget shortfalls. But as world leaders gather in New York for the annual General Assembly high-level week, the UN appears to be in particularly bad shape. China, Russia, and the United States, three of the five veto-wielding powers that dominate the Security Council, have prevented it from acting on wars in Iran and Ukraine and civil conflicts in Myanmar and Sudan. Poor countries complain that donor states have not met their UN pledges on development spending. And the Trump administration halted most U.S. funding to UN activities last year, forcing the organization to cut back on its peacekeeping and relief efforts.

With challenges mounting, an upcoming leadership transition may decide whether the UN can stabilize itself and perhaps even regain some credibility—or slide further into decrepitude. Current Secretary-General António Guterres plans to step down at the end of the year, having struggled to reverse the organization’s political fortunes in his decadelong tenure. He has spent much of his last two years in office grappling with staff reductions and other cost-cutting measures to ensure the UN secretariat does not go bankrupt on his watch. His has been a thankless task, but diplomats and UN officials hope a new leader will be able to take a longer-term approach to refreshing the institution and keeping governments committed to multilateralism.

The small crop of candidates to succeed Guterres include senior UN trade official Rebeca Grynspan, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi, and Guyana’s Ambassador to the UN Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett. Regardless of who wins, Guterres' successor will need to develop a new playbook for revitalizing the organization. Any serious effort must acknowledge an unpleasant reality: as long as the world remains competitive and chaotic, the UN’s ability to forge wide-ranging international agreements will remain constrained.

The next secretary-general’s best hope may thus be to relinquish some of the organization’s previous lofty ambitions and slim down, prioritizing international crisis prevention and conflict resolution, the efficient provision of humanitarian aid, and achievable international development goals. A UN that jettisons time-consuming diplomatic processes and inefficient bureaucracies for a few core functions may disappoint ardent advocates of global governance. But it also may be the only version of the organization still viable in an era of great-power competition and austerity.

LESS MONEY, MORE PROBLEMS

Since the end of the Cold War, UN chiefs have responded to moments of crisis by arguing that the institution should do more, not less. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the first secretary-general of the post–Cold War era, envisioned the UN as a supercharged global peacemaking body, but during his final years in office, after blue helmet peacekeepers failed to prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995, the organization briefly retrenched. Beginning in the late 1990s, Boutros-Ghali’s successor, Kofi Annan, set out a new approach, establishing fresh poverty-reduction goals, battling AIDS, and launching UN peace operations in Kosovo, Timor-Leste, and several African countries. The U.S. war in Iraq, in 2003, split the Security Council and temporarily derailed Annan’s agenda, but he organized a global summit in 2005 to persuade governments to recommit to multilateralism and led the establishment of a new Peacebuilding Commission and the Geneva-based Human Rights Council the following year.

In the two decades since Annan left office, his successors, Ban Ki-moon and Guterres, have had to contend with a mounting catalog of crises, above all the Syrian civil war, which divided the Security Council for over a decade. As the number of conflicts, humanitarian crises, and natural disasters increased, so, too, did the UN’s budget. The combined revenue of all UN entities rose from $40 billion in 2010 to a high of $74 billion in 2022, driven in considerable part by greater humanitarian spending.

Ban and Guterres also repeatedly appealed to UN members to show greater solidarity. Ban championed the........

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