World Peace in 2024? The Olympics Has a Plan but Not Much Hope.

The International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, making the case at the United Nations on Tuesday for peace during the Games.Credit...Brendan Mcdermid/ReutersThe president of the International Olympic Committee strode to the podium this week inside the gold-hued assembly hall of the United Nations and proceeded to paint a bleak picture of the world outside.

Society was on a “downward spiral,” the president, Thomas Bach, suggested. He had never before seen so much “confrontation, division and polarization.” He rued the rising “scourge of war and violence.”

Then, as diplomats elsewhere in the building discussed prisoner swaps in Gaza and as soldiers continued to die in the muddy…