BRASILIA, Aug. 22 -- Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva spent eighty minutes on the telephone to Donald Trump on Friday, and somewhere inside them he asked the American president to convene an extraordinary session of the United Nations Security Council. Brazil does not sit on it.

The request appears in the Brazilian presidency's own account of the call, which says Lula lamented the Council's inoperativeness before proposing the meeting as a route to diplomatic solutions for the current crises. He has been saying a version of this for a while. In April he told a gathering of progressive leaders in Barcelona that the five permanent members needed to change their behaviour after failing to stop the war in Iran. Brasilia has been campaigning for a p...