Ghassan Salamé, 72, is a lucid and recognized observer of the Middle East and the state of the world. Renowned intellectual, academic, former Minister of Culture and Education in Lebanon, former special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, then UN special envoy to Iraq and Libya... His multiple hats and his long experience of diplomat gives weight and credit to his words.
Throughout conflicts and crises, he rubbed shoulders with the greatest leaders, and was even almost killed in an attack perpetrated on August 19, 2003, in front of the United Nations offices in Baghdad.
Living between France and Lebanon, this emeritus professor of international relations at Sciences-Po Paris and author of around ten works on the subject has just published "The temptation of Mars. War and peace in the 21st century" (ed. Fayard), in which he delivers his vision of the global geopolitical scene.
In the second part of the long interview he gave to France 24, Ghassan Salamé returns to the paralysis of the UN Security Council, the question of the use of force and the trivialization of the nuclear threat.
Find the first part of the interview: War in Gaza: “We are reaching a level of monstrosity with which we will have to live”
France 24: You have held several leading positions at the United Nations. As the war rages in Ukraine and Gaza, the organization is often singled out for its impotence, with a Security Council often paralyzed. Do you think that the UN is still useful in dealing with the wars and crises that are shaking the world
?
Ghassan Salamé:
We have every right to ask the question. However, I believe that we must remember that the UN is not an organization, but an archipelago of organizations. Among these, some work relatively well. I believe tens of millions of people would die of hunger if the World Food Program were to end tomorrow. I believe that the survival of 130 million refugees in the world would be at stake if the UNHCR also disappeared. Furthermore, international law would suffer from an enormous deficit if the International Court of Justice were to no longer function. And I can multiply these examples by talking about Unicef or the World Health Organization. So there are parts of this archipelago that continue to be very active and extremely useful throughout the world.
However, and this is the heart of the matter, the Security Council, the institution responsible for peace and security in the world, is indeed often paralyzed. It was so for a very long time during the Cold War, due to the opposition between Washington and Moscow. Then we hoped in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the Security Council could regain its primary function as a repository of collective security at the global level. He did this to a large extent, notably by organizing the liberation of Kuwait in 1990, with 12 resolutions which both made it possible to mobilize 65 countries, but also set clear limits and objectives for this operation. He also did it in certain other cases, with difficulties, and with failures too, notably in Rwanda or Bosnia. But it is true that the minimum trust necessary for this institution to function well is no longer there. Today, Westerners no longer have any confidence in Vladimir Putin. Americans are very suspicious of China, while Moscow and Beijing view Washington's projects around the world with suspicion. This is why, when there is a breakdown in mutual trust between the great powers which have a permanent seat and the right of veto, the Security Council is paralyzed again. And such is the case today with Ukraine, it can hardly move forward with a Russia that blocks everything that can be decided. This is also the case in the war in Gaza, where, as we have seen, the Security Council can hardly be very useful with the right of veto enjoyed by the United States, which is entirely aligned with Israel. It is an institution that is extremely sensitive to the state of relations between the great powers, which is not the case for the other parts of this enormous archipelago that is commonly called the United Nations.
In your opinion, is it possible to reform the Security Council? What needs to change?
We can reform it, but the question is not about adding five or ten new members. What we must do is limit the use of the veto, because we who come from small countries think that the right of veto is firstly unequal and secondly that it constitutes an obstacle to the functioning of the Council of Europe. security. Except that by limiting or outright banning its use, we risk calling into question the interest that the great powers have in this institution – if, for example, Russia were considered with the same eyes as Lebanon, or if the United States were ever placed on the same level as East Timor. That is to say, if we applied to the Security Council the same rule of absolute equality between States that exists within the UN General Assembly. On the other hand, we can force the great powers to justify their veto. Liechtenstein proposed this reform which was adopted last year. And we can hope that in the future, this amendment will be expanded so that not only do they explain why they used their veto, but also so that there is a debate. Perhaps even a vote in the General Assembly, to which we could give more rights, such as that of adopting resolutions that are effective and executive. This is much more representative of global diversity than is the Security Council. Still, until now, all attempts at reform have not really succeeded, except one which consisted of extending the number of members of the Security Council to fifteen, without affecting the right of veto.
See also Return to the use of the right of veto at the United Nations
On March 25, the Security Council adopted its first resolution demanding an "immediate ceasefire" in Gaza, but this initiative had no effect on the Israeli government. How
can we
, in a context of almost global deregulation of the force that you describe in your book, ensure that international legality is respected?
The answer is in your question. One of the big problems we have to face arises from the fact that a country having largely contributed to the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919 and the creation of the UN in 1945, during the San Francisco conference, in he – since I am talking about the United States –, and who has the largest military force in the world and a permanent seat on the Security Council, is the very one who deregulates the force and violates the norms that he has itself established. It therefore becomes very difficult to convince other nations not to do the same. This is why I say that the original sin of this deregulation of force was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And I would add that there were two wars against Saddam Hussein's Iraq which are similar in appearance, that of 1990 and that of 2003. In reality, they were fundamentally different in the sense that the first had a clear objective, to restore the sovereignty of Kuwait. It was an almost perfect illustration of the United Nations collective security system. That of 2003, launched by the United States, had no clear objective, but false justifications. It was done without any authorization from the Security Council and despite the opposition of countries that count in the world such as France, Germany and Russia.
The notion of an international community, which assumes that its members share common values, no longer seems relevant after reading your book which provides a sort of state of the world.
During a mission for the United Nations, I was questioned as a representative of the international community. So I brought out to my interlocutors a sentence from a colleague at Sciences-Po which I really liked: “The first characteristic of the international community is that it does not exist”. I don't believe that the international community exists. Because not only, as you say, would there need to be a greater sharing of values, but there would also need to be a higher level of solidarity to create any human community and an international community like a national community or a community in general. However, neither values are shared enough, nor solidarity is exercised enough. So we can hardly talk about an international community because it is an aspiration, an ideal. It is the international system which exists, which can move in the direction of its transformation, possibly, into an international community or can go quite the opposite – which is the case now – towards more fragmentation, which would establish an international system based fundamentally on the balance of power. Unfortunately, by studying the military budgets which are starting to increase again, by looking at the wars which are breaking out in the four corners of the planet, we have the impression that we are moving more towards fragmentation than towards integration.
You worry in your book that democracy is showing signs of fatigue. Should we fear that this phenomenon
,
which you call "democratic reflux"
,
will affect Western countries?
I have no doubt that it is already affecting the West. Democracy does not disappear overnight, although it is true that there are cases too obvious to dispute. When you have a coup in Burma or Niger, civil, even democratic, power disappears overnight. But in many other countries, we are witnessing a kind of progressive disintegration of democracy, either because it has been reduced to a simple electoral vote, or because populism has been extremely dominant. India, the largest democracy in the world, is going through a populist phase and also an Islamophobic phase, which excludes more than 200 million Muslims from all public office. In Türkiye or Russia, things are not much better. But we also see populism beginning to take hold in several Western countries as well. And the installation of populism is generally a symptom of a disease of democracy. The latter can hardly prosper in the clash of parties that would be populist.
Are you referring to the United States where an outgoing president, Donald Trump, vigorously contested his defeat at the polls?
Exactly. That populism is coming to the country that is the mother of democracies is telling. Seeing a president question the result of the presidential election from the White House and calling on his supporters to occupy his country's Parliament is not an extremely reassuring sign about the health of democracy, even in the West. Especially since some of the voters are likely to bring him back to power, ignoring these multiple problems, particularly of a judicial nature.
Also read: Vladimir Putin brandishes his nuclear submarines to give the impression of power
A chapter
in
your book is entitled “
Nuclear in ambush”. At what level do you place the threat of a nuclear conflict
,
which we believed to be behind us since the end of the Cold War?
I think this threat is back. When I was younger, I gave courses at Sciences-Po on the nuclear taboo that had taken hold. On the fact that it should not be used, which has not been done since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the fact that we shouldn't even talk about it or threaten it. Now, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev claims that Moscow would resort to nuclear weapons if Ukraine took control of “Russian territories”. An Israeli minister also threatened to bomb the Gaza Strip. In 1995, at the time of the infinite renewal of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the nuclear club had only five official members – the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain and France. Since then, he has admitted, coerced and forced, four countries which did not sign this agreement and which became nuclear powers, namely Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea. Today, even Iran is enriching uranium to levels indicating intentions not necessarily toward civilian use. There is therefore a proliferation of signs which demonstrate that the taboo, if it has not entirely fallen, has largely become trivialized in recent years and that certain countries may now be tempted to equip themselves with nuclear arsenals.
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