For a state that because of its Cold War divisions finally joined the United Nations only in 1991, South Korea has been done the singular honour of having its minister of foreign affairs and trade selected to become the world body's eighth secretary general.
Ban Ki-moon seems certain to be elected to the post by the General Assembly this week. He takes up office just as the North Korean nuclear issue comes to the top of the international agenda and is exceedingly well qualified to deal with it.
His major challenge will be to rise beyond the skilful consensus politics which gave him the victory, to assert international political leadership over the next five years. Following Kofi Annan will be a hard act. The Ghanaian developed a stronger international profile in his second term, with an ambitious set of UN Millennium Development Goals, a wide-ranging debate on UN reform and repeated travels to troubled areas, which created a greater political autonomy for himself. This told during the Iraq war. And it has made a difference to his overseeing an unprecedented 92,000 UN peacekeeping troops throughout the world at present.
Mr Ban will now take on leadership of this involvement and the opportunity to develop it. He has a deep knowledge of the UN system. He is well aware that the UN secretariat stands accused of corruption and ineptitude by influential member states and is determined to oversee managerial reform.
Mr Ban showed his steely side as South Korean foreign minister in dealing with the North Korean nuclear issue. He helped distance his government from the United States position on this and other matters, while working more closely with the Chinese in pursuit of a multilateral approach to them. Critics say he could have handled these transitions better and should have been more vocal about North Korean human rights abuses rather than trying not to antagonise its governing regime. He will now have a central role in the crisis and can be counted on to ensure that the possibility of resolving it by multilateral negotiation is kept alive.
Mr Ban has described himself as a "harmoniser, balancer and mediator", emphasising his consensual skills; but the shifts of policy during his time as South Korea's foreign minister also involved political choices to change his country's direction. A similar combination of consensus and choice will be needed in running the UN. It is to be hoped he can graduate from one to the other over the next five years to give him standing as a statesman of the world system. East Asian affairs will be much more central in world politics over this time.