Eager to make a diplomatic breakthrough somewhere, Secretary-General Ban is increasingly concentrating his efforts on places like Sudan and Lebanon. Instead, he should redirect his laser-like focus on another global hotspot where a breakthrough is actually possible — and where it is just as necessary: the United Nations.

Mr. Ban has been painfully slow at filling vacant U.N. positions. The internal justice system remains hostile to whistleblowers while old wagons circle around wrongdoers. A system-wide audit — meant to start with a probe of the activities of one agency in North Korea — now looks like a whitewash.

After some trial and error, Mr. Ban’s political team realized that the best it would be able to do is to play a marginal role in high-profile disputes such as the one between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. They correctly identified Lebanon and Sudan as areas where a U.N. chief might have some effect.

Unlike elsewhere in the Middle East, the U.N. brand carries a great deal of prestige in Lebanon. And even as Sudan’s government has made an effort to equate U.N. diplomats with evil crusaders and colonialists, the big powers turn to Turtle Bay for a leading role in efforts to stop atrocities in Darfur.

Mr. Ban tried engaging the two strongmen who rule Sudan and Syria, Omar al-Bashir and Bashar al-Assad, but “The Bashar and Bashir Show” has turned into a farce. Mr. Ban should now go to the Security Council and recommend that it turn up the heat on — rather than plead with — with dictators.

The Sudanese militia known as Janjaweed has recently stepped up its murderous campaign in Darfur — with support from Khartoum. Mr. Bashir fears that a loss of control over Darfur will erode his ability to project power. America and its allies hope to deploy 20,000 U.N.-led troops to protect Darfur civilians, replacing an 8000-troop African Union force. To Mr. Bashir, this looks like an evil plot to limit his grip over the country further.

While Mr. Assad’s father, Hafez, was obsessed with his 1967 loss of the Golan Heights to Israel, Syria’s Alawite Baathist leader is consumed by fear of losing the wealth-producing Lebanon. A U.N.-backed tribunal to try suspects in political assassinations would bring to justice his top confidantes and relatives, threatening his regime’s dominion not only over Lebanon, but also over Syria itself.

Neither dictator, therefore, is about to negotiate in good faith, but both will make all the idle promises that they can to delay the inevitable. In the case of Sudan, the inevitable is the imposition of meaningful Security Council sanctions to force Mr. Bashir to accept U.N. troops. In Syria’s case, the council needs to enforce the tribunal that it has established, so the government in Beirut can overcome the pro-Syrian minority’s resistance, fomented by Damascus.

In both cases, Mr. Ban’s attempts to engage the dictators have reached their inevitable dead end. I am told that this realization has been made clear to him in recent days by the smiling and quietly effective new American U.N. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ban has been painfully slow in announcing key appointments for U.N. posts in the Middle East, Sudan, and a soon-to-be vacant spot in Iraq. Holdovers from Mr. Ban’s predecessor, Kofi Annan, still represent the United Nations in places like Lebanon. Top candidates for key positions are complaining that Mr. Ban has been holding up their appointments. Uncertain about the future, they have explored non-U.N. opportunities.

And an audit of the U.N. Development Program office in Pyongyang, announced by Mr. Ban in January after reports of violations of the agency’s rules in North Korea, was meant to show that Mr. Ban will act quickly to uproot the corruption that plagued Mr. Annan’s administration. It was meant to start a process that would independently re-examine all U.N. programs.

But the U.N. board of auditors probe has proved toothless. Rather than examining the UNDP’s actions in an environment where every penny is controlled by Kim Jong Il, the auditors decided to hand in their report without even visiting North Korea. We are yet to see what they learned, but it is already clear that their report will lack some necessary ingredients, including an examination of the effectiveness of the UNDP’s programs, which could hardly have been done without seeing the results of those programs.

Only after setting things right in his own house can Mr. Ban — whose instincts about international affairs are sound — expect to turn himself into a useful tool for setting things right in the world.