Egypt's president Mohamed Morsi said he was holding discussions with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey on forming a quartet of nations tasked with finding a solution to the crisis in Syria.
That conflict looks to continue and there is little hope for a long-term ceasefire in Syria, despite preparations for a meeting between a multi-nation "task force" led by Russia and the United States.
Aware of "the legacy of paternalism... inherited from the ideology of empire," Feldman argues that the nation-building task can be "salvaged ethically only if it is stripped down to the modest proposition that the nation builder exercises temporary political authority as trustee on behalf of the people being governed".
One of the member nations' biggest tasks today is the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL).
Satellites from many nations were tasked with imaging the magnitude of the flooding in places such as the Somerset Levels.
And by his involvement in a church that dares to call the nation to task in accordance with the our own high-minded ideals and professed religious convictions, he may very well stem the tide of the trivialization of religion that has so easily allowed the religious values of peace and mercy to serve the misbegotten ends of a perpetual war.
But a host of nation-building tasks lie ahead, none more daunting than the integration of the former Maoist rebels into the national army.
Mr. Gates has called for a reinvigorated, better-financed State Department, so that diplomats can pick up some of the nation-building tasks that have fallen to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That means, one American officer said, that enlistment standards are being lowered at a time when the military faces counterinsurgency and nation-building tasks that are more complex than the traditional missions during the cold war.
For Mr. Bremer, the 61-year-old occupation administrator of Iraq, the daunting problems of the most complex and expensive nation-building tasks the United States has undertaken in a half-century have only intensified since President Bush appointed him on May 6.
Problems began when donor states and the Afghan Government thought they could unilaterally perform stability and nation-building tasks better than the UN.
