The modern United Nations, a more muscular and inclusive body than its predecessor, has survived close to four times longer than the League of Nations, but as its General Assembly meets this week in New York, the U.N. – like the League – risks falling increasingly short. Few believe change, while necessary, is imminent or likely.

Decades of attempts to reform the U.N. Security Council are – like the council itself on issues such as Syria, the South China Sea and wider human rights – comprehensively deadlocked. The five permanent members – Britain, France and the United States on one side, Russia and China on the other – are increasingly at loggerheads. Other emerging powers such as India and Brazil want permanent access, but there seems little or no road map to obtaining it. Those five permanent members have minimal incentive to share power and no one can agree which other states should be allowed to join them.

The wider General Assembly is little more than a talking shop – as usual, the primary outcomes of this year's September session will likely be from bilateral meetings between leaders on its sidelines, not the main floor. The assembly gives smaller nations and groupings a voice, and its resolutions can do useful work, like establishing internal U.N. bodies or events like International Women's Day. But these resolutions are frequently nonbinding, with the result that those on substantial issues like the 2014 Ukraine conflict inevitably have little or no real-world impact.

It is all a far cry from the hopes of the U.N.'s founders in 1945.

That does not make it worthless. The most effective U.N. work is often done by its smaller bodies, agencies and envoys. U.N. Special Representative for Syria Staffan de Mistura has been unable to stop the conflict; the warring parties and their international backers have simply made that impossible. But he and his team have kept the process of dialogue going, and that itself has value.

Indeed, the greatest single achievement of the U.N. has probably been to preserve and build that spirit of international cooperation as something positive and worth refining, even if it often fails in practice. For all the realpolitik at the Security Council level, most other elements of the U.N. continue to push an explicitly internationalist, liberal, human, women's and minority rights-based agenda.

Without the U.N., the world would likely not have had the Sustainable Development Goals that have, at the very least, helped shape thinking on global poverty reduction. The same might be plausibly argued of the Paris climate process.

In truth, the United Nations is barely one entity at all. Agencies such as the World Food Program, World Health Organization, UNICEF, Food and Agriculture Organization and others all have their critics, but provide a fundamental backbone to the world's humanitarian responses that exceed what any one group can do on its own, even the nongovernmental Red Cross. Without them, responses to disasters such as the 2014 Ebola outbreak or refugee crises in the Middle East and Europe would be much, much harder.

Peacekeeping missions run by the Peacekeeping Operations Department can only occur when the world's great powers agree on what to do. Some missions can be never-ending, with peacekeepers accused of sexual and other abuse in several nations. But the U.N. can also claim successes, notably overseeing transitions from civil war to peace in countries such as Mozambique, Cambodia, Guatemala and Tajikistan.

When it comes to holding more powerful countries to account, the U.N.'s record is extremely mixed. Last month, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination cited estimates that Beijing may be holding up to one million ethnic Muslim Uighurs in detention camps in China's western Xinjiang province – a report Chinese officials dismissed as having "no factual basis." Beijing has never confirmed the existence of such camps, and blamed criticism of its policies in Xinjiang on "anti-China forces." Another group of U.N. investigators called for Myanmar officials to be tried for genocide over their campaign against the Muslim Rohingya minority.

Other U.N. bodies such as the Human Rights Council have been much less forthright, often dominated by countries such as China, Iran and Pakistan accused of their own abuses. The United States withdrew from the body this year, saying it is biased against Israel and avoids scrutinizing states such as Iran, North Korea and Syria. And when it comes to determining international acts of military aggression – one of the primary purposes of both the U.N. and League of Nations – the U.N. is again struggling.

The decision of U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to circumvent it in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq delivered a clear, and with hindsight, damaging credibility blow. Russia felt little or no consequences through the U.N. for its annexation of Crimea, nor the long-running Ukraine war that followed. China did have its knuckles rapped by a U.N. court over its grandiose claims in the South China Sea, but this has done nothing to slow its inexorable building and military expansion in the region.

Those at the top strike a difficult balance. In taking office, current U.N. Secretary General António Guterres talked of the need for dramatic reform, but also pledged to keep "member states in the driving seat." That's language likely designed to reassure national governments, deliberately ambiguous as to whether he meant the small governments that dominate the General Assembly or the Security Council great powers.

It might yet take another world war-scale catastrophe to generate effective institutional reform. But for now, the U.N.'s most important role remains forcing the world's most powerful nations into constant dialogue on matters of global importance.

We should be glad we have it. Countries could never build it today.

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In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Syrian media reported a second suspected Israeli airstrike within the country in little more than a week. In the West, speculation continued as to how Russia – which promised "consequences" for the weekend's U.S., French and British launch of over 100 missiles against chemical weapons plants in Syria – might respond, with Western officials particularly nervous about whether Moscow was planning any cyber attacks.

Western states and their Gulf allies, meanwhile, are still struggling to hammer out their next steps. U.S. President Donald Trump is sending contradicting messages, saying that he wants to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, but also promising to continue actions to stop the use of chemical weapons by President Bashar Assad's regime. Adding to the confusion: French President Emmanuel Macron's backing off of claims that he persuaded Trump to keep U.S. forces in Syria.

The murkiness continues on wider Russia policy too, with the White House debunking earlier talk by U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley about plans for a new round of sanctions against Moscow.

All this points to a larger and increasingly awkward reality for Washington.

In some respects, the strikes were a potent reminder of the reach and scope of U.S. military power – as was Russia's apparent reluctance to make good on its threats to intercept missiles or strike back against the ships and planes that fired them. Even if the latest strikes do successfully deter Assad from using chemical weapons again, however, they do nothing to stop the broader balance of geopolitical power shifting away from the United States in the Middle East and beyond.

On the ground in Syria, Assad continues to entrench his power, with conventional government airstrikes continuing over the weekend as rebel groups fell back in key areas. Israel, Iran and Turkey continue to fight their own respective proxy wars within the country with ever greater force.

Tuesday brought new reports that Washington now wishes to replace the approximately 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria with Arab forces, a sign that the Trump administration may be resigned to delegating regional decision-making to local powers.

In striking Syria, Washington demonstrated that it still remains the dominant military force in the Mediterranean – at least when it chooses to ramp up its forces. Stepped-up Russian and Chinese activity in other regions, however, means U.S. power is increasingly spread thin. As the U.S. Navy moved one aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean to face Russia and Syria, China was conducting its largest naval military exercises to date in the South China Sea.

These were followed this week by China's live fire drills in the Taiwan Strait, a move seen as a naked attempt to intimidate Beijing's potential foes – and U.S. allies – in the region.

For all their global ambitions, Moscow and Beijing remain keenly focused on their own immediate backyards in Eastern Europe and Asia, deliberately designing their militaries to be able to push back against more limited U.S. forces in those areas. Smaller U.S. foes such as Iran and North Korea are making similar judgments. They will have been reminded this weekend that Washington retains the ability to inflict quick one-off damage should they do so, but their main focus remains deterring the United States from considering actions aimed at wider regime change.

Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about the most recent Syria face-off is how little discussion there appears to have been in Washington of stepping up wider action against Assad. Beyond enforcing the often-mentioned "red lines" over chemical weapons usage, there is no longer any real appetite for attempting to oust Syria's leader, particularly after the problems left behind by the ousting of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Washington's enemies, meanwhile – particularly Russia's President Vladimir Putin – continue to use these confrontations to try out new techniques for frustrating the United States. Last week saw Moscow reportedly blocking GPS signals over parts of Syria, thereby interfering with the activities of U.S. drones. More broadly, Russia's information warfare activities have also been stepped up, spreading division in the West. Rather than shoot down U.S. missiles, Russia appears to have simply decided to say it had done so, further muddying the waters of already fraught international discourse.

Many of these trends have been a long time coming – and any U.S. administration would have had a tough time managing them. Trump's team finds itself facing a world more chaotic – and adversaries more confident and innovative – than anything the Obama administration imagined even two years ago.

Still, it is difficult not to conclude that the idiosyncratic nature of the Trump presidency may make managing this more difficult. That may become even more true with Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly sidelined and the president preoccupied with prosecutor Robert Mueller's Russia probe.

To an extent, the weekend Syria strikes were little more than highly ritualized theater, a largely bloodless exercise in the United States enforcing red lines and standing up to Russian intimidation. That it was managed without inflicting major casualties on any side is in some respects reassuring, but there will be more crises like this to come – and some may prove much more dangerous.

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