Diplomacy within reach.

I choose to believe.

It is not an easy sentence to write today. The institutions born of the last world war are contested on every side, international law too often gives way to force, and we hear every day that each country would do better to rely on itself alone. Those arguments carry weight. I hear them, I read them, I understand them. I choose to believe all the same, because history offers more reasons to hope than to give up.

In 1945, fifty-one states signed the Charter of the United Nations on the ruins of a world that had just shown what it was capable of. Today there are one hundred and ninety-three. In 1948, in Paris, at the Palais de Chaillot, the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a text no one was bound to honour and that so many constitutions have drawn on since. In 1980, smallpox, which had killed hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century alone, was declared eradicated after a campaign led by the World Health Organization with countries that agreed on almost nothing else. In 1987, the Montreal Protocol committed the world to protecting the ozone layer. It became the first treaty ratified by every state, and the ozone layer is healing.