A woman to lead the UN?

A woman for the next secretary general of the United Nations?

Well, it is a lot more complicated than that. There are other criteria in play; there is an unwritten rule that the regions of the world should take turns to occupy the UN’s top job.

The East Europeans are saying it is their turn. Ironically, since Eastern Europe is now part of Western Europe, the EU, the would-be candidates are in effect appealing to Russia to vote for them, since, geographically, only as part of the old Soviet alliance can they be regarded as an entity separate from Western Europe.

How about a South Asian? 

It would make sense, since there has never been a secretary general from there before and the subcontinent contains 1.7 billion people. However, no one has put himself forward.

Or an Australasian? Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark cast her hat into the ring.

I would argue that it is time to forget gender or place of origin. It is character that should be the critical element by which the candidate is judged.

We need a leadership that knows how to transcend mankind’s divisions, to diminish our most primitive instincts and to enhance our nobler ones.

It must have the power of personality that inspires the best of us and takes us onward and beyond what we do now, so often unsatisfactorily and insufficiently, to what we could do if human energies were liberated from the confines of too simple and narrow a perspective.

We need to move much further than we have so far, beyond country, race, religion, culture, language and lifestyle to being part of what Martin Luther King called the beloved community.

“We seek only”, he said, “to make possible a world where men can live as brothers”.

Leadership, we know, is an intangible quality that can only be described as it is observed.

Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Pope Francis and Vladimir Putin have it today, but who else?

But we can describe some of the ingredients needed at the UN if its leadership is to have any chance of working in today’s world.

The leader must understand the need to preempt crises, as well as have the ability to persist with a resolution once it occurs.

He/she must believe that the application of force is the signature of defeat and that true peace comes from careful compromise where no one is asked to abase himself before his opponent — even if he is the leader of Syria, North Korea or Sudan.

He/she must be inspirational and take us into the reaches of our best performance, even enabling us to move far beyond what we have achieved before.

He/she must be practical and down to earth, sifting through the essentials and concentrating on what really are the priorities of living; moral, selfless and yet convinced of his/her own audacity.

In the end, he/she must be immensely courageous, for the problems faced can appear at times quite daunting or overwhelming.

The need for the world community to find a powerful leadership for the UN is of first importance.

The UN is everyone’s kicking boy, but it is interesting how in a crisis, the big powers run to it.

When the big powers have talked or acted themselves into a corner, they can, as a last resort, let the smaller powers at the UN find an exit for them.

The UN is easy to kick around, but impossible to recreate. Would the US Senate ratify the Charter in 2016?

Fortunately, under Barack Obama, the US had done much to repair the frayed relationship that developed during the early years of the presidency of George W. Bush. (Interestingly, during his last two years in office, he found, like Ronald Reagan before him, that he should not kick it but work with it.)

To sum up: A new secretary general has to win the trust of the big powers so they look up, not down, at him or her.

Who can do this?

Looking at the list of announced candidates, I do not think any of those from Eastern Europe, male or female, are good enough. Clark is not strong enough.

In my mind, Merkel should be the one.