Fifteen years after its beginning, the League of Nations was a scrap of paper, and the world was lurching and reeling towards war. That there is still hope for peace today, fifteen years after the founding of the United Nations, is due in great part to the efforts of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. The recent drama in the General Assembly and the failure of the Soviet plan to weaken Hammarskjold's authority illustrate to what extent this extraordinary man has defined his own role in world politics.

For the office is really his; he has been creating it every day. Although the Secretary-General has a constitutional right under the UN Charter to send troops to the Congo, for example, a lesser man than Hammarskjold would have hesitated. And on Oct. 3, when Premier Khrushchev demanded that he resign and proposed the plan to neutralize his office, Hammarskjold characteristically refused--and won a standing ovation from the General Assembly. Equally important, Prime Minister Nehru's speech was symbolic of a growing respect the African and Asian nations entertain for the Secretary-General.

In his address to the Assembly, Hammarskjold made it clear why the Africans and Asians are supporting his conception of the U.N. For in the speech, Hammarskjold declared that the UN exists as much for the small and the new states as for the great and the old. He believes passionately that it is the UN's role to protect these states and maintain them in the teeth of the cold war. He will not quit, will not allow Khrushchev to hamstring the world body because he knows that the UN--his UN--requires an executive powerful enough to resist pressures from any bloc.

There is, despite the support given him, some chance that his usefulness to the UN has been impaired; certainly he has deepened Soviet hostility to himself and will thus be a less effective mediator in the time to come before his term of office expires in '63. But this loss is balanced by the strength his actions have given to his office.

In the future--if there is a future--Mr. Hammarskjold will be called a great man. Historians will recall that he was decisive in shaping the United Nations into something more than an arena for propaganda cock fights at a time when something more was desperately needed. They will say that he strengthened the only positive deterrent to war in a world where the peace was a consensus of terror.