Each autumn, the world's nations gather beneath the arched halls of the United Nations, bringing with them the full weight of their ambitions, grievances, and hopes. This year's General Assembly in New York offered a particularly charged tableau: an American president issuing threats of annihilation toward Iran, a newly minted British prime minister finding his footing on the world stage, and a departing Secretary General offering his final words to an institution straining under the pressures of a fractured era. These moments, however dramatic in isolation, are threads in the longer, unresolv