"Can he save the U.N. from irrelevance?"

"At the end of our interview, I asked Ban if he ever thought about children in today’s Chungjus—the places in Syria, Ukraine, and elsewhere wracked by war, but where, unlike in his case, the United Nations has been unable to reach. Does he think they still think of the United Nations the way young Ban Ki-moon once did? 

He paused. “They still believe the United Nations can save them,” he told me. “It’s only the leaders who are blocking—who are hampering their hopes.” 

Then his eyes opened wide, his voice rose, and for a moment he came as close to being angry as I’d seen him. Those leaders “should look and work for their own people, not for their own self-interest—clinging to power, disregarding, you know, whatever the people’s pride may be. This—this really angers me. I don’t know how many times I have been really confronting these people directly. That’s what I have been doing! But I cannot do it alone.”"

Ban Ki Moon and the UN. The Rest at the New Republic