The most revealing diplomatic event of this year's UN General Assembly didn't happen in the marble halls of Turtle Bay. It happened two hundred miles south, in Washington. While delegates in New York took the podium to make their appeals for international solidarity, Xi Jinping landed on American soil for a state visit, sat down with Donald Trump, and never once showed up at the UN. He hadn't addressed the General Assembly in person since 2015. This year he didn't bother sending regrets — he just went to Washington instead. Add the absences of Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi, and you have leaders of nearly half the human species deciding, in the same week, that the trip to New York wasn't worth making. That wasn't a scheduling conflict. It was an eviction notice.

For eighty years, the UN's founding bet was that raw power could be made to answer to collective norms that the Security Council and the International Court of Justice could keep the strong from simply doing what they wanted to the weak. Nobody who's watched the last few years believes that anymore. The UN hasn't collapsed in some dramatic final vote. It has done something quieter and more humiliating: it has become........

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