Obama, speaking before the United Nations, says today:

The United Nations can either be a place where we bicker about outdated grievances, or forge common ground; a place where we focus on what drives us apart, or what brings us together; a place where we indulge tyranny, or a source of moral authority. In short, the United Nations can be an institution that is disconnected from what matters in the lives of our citizens, or it can be an indispensable factor in advancing the interests of the people we serve.

After we have seen the United Nations oil-for-food scandal, the scandals of sexual abuse in no fewer than nine different countries with some allegations of hundreds of incidents, the use of “development funds” on luxury items for U.N. officials, bilking the United States for shoddy work in Afghanistan, their conferences on racism turning into festivals of anti-Semitism, human-rights councils led by some of the most repressive regimes on the planet, allegations of funding of coerced sterilizations, their inability to prevent outright genocide, much less mitigate armed conflict, their outright hostility to fundamental American rights, as laid out in the Constitution . . .

. . . what would it take to see the United Nations as a source of moral authority? How many years of keeping noses clean at the organization would be required before people began to invest moral authority in the U.N. and its leaders?