India, Sept. 13 -- Can the UN reinvent itself for a world that no longer waits for centralized authority? I believe it can. But only if it embraces the decentralized logic of the century.

As we prepare for the United Nations General Assembly, I return to a point I have made often: the world is not suffering from a crisis of multilateralism-it is suffering from a crisis of adaptation. We are trying to govern a borderless, fast-moving world with tools designed for a slower, more centralized era. Yet history shows that humanity has always known how to cooperate without concentrating power, how to coordinate without coercion, and how to govern international relations without government.

This is not a new idea. It is an old truth.

When I se...