Can you give us a couple of examples to get this conversation started on whether you think that the organization has adapted in ways that are necessary for survival Or have these shifts fundamentally weakened its core mission?

So when the UN was first created, it was created within a particular set of circumstances, right at the end of the Second World War, when there were clearly a fixed number of really great powers in the world.

And it was designed to manage the relations among those great powers, essentially, and to introduce a system of collective security in which those great powers played a major role.

What the charter didn't account for was the great changes that would happen in the world that followed.

So firstly, soon after the Second World War, the Cold War began.

So a major division between the two superpowers of the time, the United States of America and the Soviet Union.

And then in the years following the outbreak of the Cold War, a process of decolonization that accelerated and that meant that the world had many more states and there were many more members of the United Nations.

Tell us a little bit about the risks that this poses for the future of the UN, kind of broadly defined, including its specialized agencies.