The current Secretary-General Kofi Annan is a lame duck, due to retire at the end of the year and therefore unlikely to stay in place through whatever resolution or humiliation the U.N. process is to undergo. He is, moreover, a lame duck wounded and tarnished by the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal, which threw such a critical light on the working of the U.N. bureaucracy. For better or worse, he carries little weight.

It is unfortunate in the second place because today's vote on the Latin American country which will be given the next temporary seat on the U.N. Security Council, setting the U.S.-backed Guatemala against Venezuela, whose radical populist President Hugo Chavez has become such a thorn in the side of the man he calls "the devil," President George W. Bush. If Venezuela wins, it will be because of the largesse (some might call them bribes) Chavez is distributing from his swollen oil revenues.

Cut-price oil for his friends and food for Africa, airstrips for Caribbean islands and fat munitions contracts for Russia, a brand-new transplant unit for Uruguay's Hospital de Clinicas; Chavez is throwing money around to buy friends, and doubtless counts on this generosity to win votes at the United Nations. The prospect of such a fierce anti-American figure buying his way onto the Security Council is unlikely to persuade Americans, and far less the Bush administration, that the United Nations is a reliable defender of international security against a rogue state like North Korea. And without American support, and American money, the United Nations loses both credibility and much of its capacity to act.

It is unfortunate in the third place because Kofi Annan's successor as secretary-general, the South Korean career diplomat and former foreign minister Ban Ki-moon, is not yet in place to tackle the Korean crisis that he knows so well. Known as Ban in diplomatic circles, his nickname among the South Korean press corps was "slippery eel," but there was nothing slippery about his first appearance before the United Nations' press corps over the weekend.

Ban was asked a direct question whether he would fill out the usual U.N. staff form, disclosing his personal finances. This was a move that Kofi Annan had long resisted, claiming that as secretary-general he was not just another member of staff. But Ban said straight away that he would not only complete the form, but would make it public.

It was a good start, along with his speech, which sought to make a virtue of his reputation as a low-key, modest and self-effacing man, not the hard-driving and can-do figure that many of the United Nations' critics believe the 192-nation institution now needs. "Asia is also a region where modesty is a virtue. But the modesty is about demeanor, not about vision and goals. It does not mean the lack of commitment or leadership. Rather, it is quiet determination in action to get things done without so much fanfare," Ban said.

"This may be the key to Asia's success, and to the United Nations' future," he added. "Indeed, our organization is modest in its means, but not in its values. We should be more modest in our words, but not in our performance."

He certainly did not raise expectations too high, which may be a good thing. And the more that is learned about Ban's work in South Korea's foreign ministry, the more impressive he sounds. He claims never to have been even a minute late getting to his desk, his days are meticulously planned in 5-minute blocks, and this quiet workaholic sleeps only 5 hours a night. South Korean diplomats claim he was "in charge of everything, from A to Z."

In nearly three years as foreign minister, he took only two days off -- to attend his daughter's wedding. And he pushed through a sweeping internal reform at the ministry, insisting that promotions should be made on merit, rather than through seniority. He achieved this without open battles with the entrenched bureaucracy, but with quiet and determined persistence.

That same persistence helped him get the new job, which few predicted he would win when he first announced his candidacy two years ago -- perilously early to make such an open bid, according to U.N. tradition. But he knows the United Nations well, having served as top aide to Han Seung-soo, the former South Korean foreign minister who became U.N. president in 2001.

A fluent English-speaker, after getting a Red Cross scholarship to travel in the United States as a youth in 1962, he then studied at Harvard's Kennedy School. He was taught by Joseph Nye, later President Clinton's assistant secretary for defense, and the author "Soft Power," a subtle suggestion that attracting and persuading others to see things America's way usually works better than bullying.

Competence and persistence, persuasiveness and modesty, determination and the ability to handle a stolid bureaucracy; these are qualities that make a formidable combination and may be just what the United Nations needs. But he will be pitch-forked into a crisis over North Korea, and another over Iran, that have already gone dangerously far to be resolved by diplomatic means, and are likely to get worse over the next 10 weeks before he takes up his new post.

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