Kofi Annan's high-level panel on international peace and security is roughly a third of the way through its work schedule, on course to report to the secretary-general on December 1. It is too soon to speak of proposals and recommendations, but the issues have come into sharper focus. It is clear that this is an examination paper with no easy questions.

Nor has the world stood still since the panel got down to work last December. The recent failure of the Haitian state, not for the first time, reminds us just how bad we still are at preventing such failures, how short our attention span is when a country falls out of the headlines; the revelations of Muammer Gadaffi's programmes for assembling weapons of mass destruction, and of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's network for disseminating the components of such programmes, bring home how real the threat from proliferation is; the unending string of suicide and other bomb attacks, culminating in the atrocities in Karbala and Madrid, shows how far we are from mastering the menace posed by terrorism. Each of these developments is a reproach to an international community that places responsibility for human protection high among its priorities and a warning that complacency is unthinkable.

The threats now facing us are a mixture of the old and relatively new. Gone for the foreseeable future are the threat of a nuclear confrontation between superpowers. Gone too is the threat of massive conventional wars that disfigured the first half of the past century. But some of the bitter disputes of that period - particularly, but not exclusively, over Palestine and Kashmir - are unresolved; and provide the soil from which spring the dragon's teeth of newer threats. It is not the panel's task to seek to solve these disputes but nor can it ignore them.

Among newer threats, it makes no sense to focus exclusively on the headline issues of international terrorism and WMD proliferation to the exclusion of less direct threats from the failure of states, extremes of poverty, abuse of human rights, environmental degradation, international crime and pandemics such as Aids. In many places these later threats are the most immediate and pressing ones. So neither a narrow approach, nor a hierarchical one, nor one that ignores the dangerous actual or potential inter-relationships between these different threats will fit the bill.

The failure of states damages more than their own citizens. Can we find better ways to diagnose the danger signs? Can we act on such diagnoses so as to prevent the slide towards collapse, harnessing better the resources of those institutions involved in peace and security and those dealing with economic development? Where prevention fails, can we agree on criteria for intervention - and forceful intervention if necessary? Can we make a better fist of rehabilitating states that have collapsed? Can we learn to stick at that task as long as it takes?

The Security Council condemned the proliferation of WMD as long ago as 1992. This is a case where the policy is clear but execution is defective. Can we strengthen the links between the executive agencies dealing with nuclear and chemical weapons and the Security Council? Can we overcome the differences that prevent establishment of an inspection regime for biological weapons? Can we interdict all trade in the components of these systems and the means of their delivery?

When it comes to terrorism, can we find a way round the legal and political obstacles that have so far prevented the international community from outlawing this scourge in the way that it outlawed piracy and slavery?

There are questions every bit as complex and difficult in respect of poverty, the environment, trade policy and the rest of the matrix of threats we face. Responding to them all requires, in the first instance, the right policy mix; but it also requires institutions that can work effectively, and changes will certainly be needed there too.

Overshadowing all these questions is one larger one. Can we hope for a more wholehearted, less ambivalent commitment from the US to finding collective responses to these threats and challenges? Certainly a consensus that excludes the US or one whose explicit purpose was to tie the US down and constrain it would have little chance of success. So would one where the US worked through the UN only when it suited it to do so. Like the other questions this one cannot yet be answered. But in due course it will have to be, and much will be riding on the answer.

Lord Hannay is a member of the UN secretary-general's high-level panel, former British ambassador to the European Union and the UN and a member of the advisory board of the Centre for European Reform.

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