This analysis of “global leadership” delves into the question of who should be in the vanguard of global policy issues of systemic nature and worldwide concern, e.g., global finance and monetary system, climate change, global governance and the nature of the emerging world society. Global systemic issues will arise increasingly due to growing interdependence and interrelationships of the countries and peoples of the world. One of the main challenges is to evolve multilateral, participatory and democratic approaches to study, understand, deal with and act on such complex issues. Achieving this goal will require strengthening the United Nations, overcoming unilateralism and the traditional intellectual dominance of the North, and evolving approaches that correspond to the nascent polycentric world system. This think piece by two veterans of global multilateral politics, enduring idealists and believers in the UN, is a contribution both to the scholarship of international relations and organizations, and to global policy activism, debate and thinking about the nature and direction of world economic and political order in the 21st century.