In a world of wars and climate crisis, a new leader could save the UN. But would Trump allow it? | Steve Bloomfield

As the organisation meets this week, it remains the best hope for restoring order. But it relies on goodwill from the US president - and that is lacking

If all goes to plan, at some stage in the coming weeks 15 diplomats will emerge from a small sound-proofed room deep in the bowels of the United Nations headquarters in New York and announce the organisation's next secretary-general.

The person they choose will face a combination of challenges unlike any that their predecessors have had to deal with. Two of the security council's permanent members, the US and Russia, are engaged in wars of choice that have no end in sight. A UN commission of inquiry has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, but the UN has effectively been reduced to the role of bystander, pushed out by Donald Trump's Board of Peace. The climate crisis is creating a cascade of new humanitarian disasters, while every day now seems to bring a new security threat caused by the unregulated rise of AI.

Steve Bloomfield is the former international editor of the Observer and a previous winner of the Orwell prize