The quest to fix the United Nations is almost as old as the organization itself. Eighty years ago, Allied leaders imagined a postwar order in which the great powers would together safeguard a permanent peace. The Security Council, dominated by its five veto-wielding members—the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China—reflected the world as it was. Other, less hierarchical parts of the new UN system were meant to foster international cooperation across a host of issues: the global economy, public health, agriculture, education. The seeds of a future planetary government were evident from the start.

The UN was initially conceived as a military alliance, but that objective became impossible with the onset of the Cold War. Many observers predicted an early death for the UN. But the organization survived and was soon reenergized, fashioning aims that its founders never imagined, such as peacekeeping. Its secretary-general became a figure on the global stage as the world’s preeminent diplomat, jetting off to war zones to negotiate cease-fires. Specialized agencies under the UN, such as its Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and a raft of new technical assistance programs spread their wings. For some officials, scholars, and activists both within and outside the UN, a hopeful vision of global government persisted.

The American legal scholar Richard Falk and the former German diplomat Hans von Sponeck are clearly in the camp of those who would like to see a far stronger UN. In Liberating the United Nations, they make the case for an organization that can deal effectively with the slew of challenges facing the world today, from climate change to nuclear proliferation. They see no alternative. At the same time, they bemoan the UN’s current dysfunctional state and its increasing marginalization from the major issues of the day. The global body, they say, “is more needed than ever before and yet less relevant as a political actor than at any time since its establishment in 1945.”

The authors provide a detailed overview of the UN’s complex structures and multifaceted undertakings and make a spirited attempt to convince readers that a renewed investment in the organization is the best possible path to a better future. They offer a worthy vision of an ideal global body, imagining, for example, a reformed Security Council linked with civil society organizations from around the world. Their prescriptions, however, do not fully account for challenges to the UN’s legitimacy and standing. Given today’s realities, those who believe in the enduring importance of the UN should not seek to make the institution all things to all people but should instead adopt a laser-like focus on strengthening the organization’s most fundamental function: preventing war.

In Falk and von Sponeck’s telling, the UN has demonstrated considerable innovation, even during the Cold War, despite the constraints of that era’s superpower rivalry. This was especially true under Dag Hammarskjold, who served as secretary-general from 1953 until his death, in 1961, and pioneered new forms of preventive diplomacy. The speedy deployment of blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers during the Suez crisis in 1956 was a prime example of this early creativity.

By the 1990s, with the Cold War over and Moscow’s veto no longer a hindrance to American primacy, the UN expanded its peacekeeping operations, which proved successful in places as far from the seats of power as El Salvador and East Timor. The organization also became an intellectual leader—it crafted, for example, the notion of human development as a counterbalance to the simple metric of per capita GDP.

For Falk and von Sponeck, this was also a period of lost opportunity, as the United States focused its energies on consolidating a new international regime favorable to global capitalism rather than on building the foundation of a UN-centered world government. A series of peacekeeping failures, from Bosnia to Rwanda, colored the lead-up to the turn of the century, by which time the world’s post–Cold War enthusiasm for the UN had largely dissipated. The American invasion of Iraq without UN authorization marked a new low point for the........

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