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00:00There was the talk when the Berlin Wall fell about the end of history, according to one
00:05historian.
00:06Of course, that didn't happen.
00:07With us is Ghassan Salameh, former academic, not former, present academic, former diplomat
00:14at the United Nations, advisor to Kofi Annan, Lebanese culture minister.
00:19Your latest book, The Temptation of Mars, reviews why the world's become more confrontational.
00:24I want to talk to you about it.
00:27First, let's talk about your latest, your last official gig, which was as the special
00:31envoy to Libya from 2017 to 2020.
00:38Your latest successor just stepped down, saying it's an impossible job and that nobody can
00:43do it.
00:45Is that true?
00:46It's not really true.
00:47It depends what you are looking for.
00:50I was looking for something more realistic than having an operational state, a great
00:57democracy, fair elections.
01:00I was not looking for that.
01:02I was looking first for a ceasefire because I found the country at war with itself.
01:08So I was looking for a ceasefire.
01:11It's also an interior economy where most people live on what the government gives them out
01:16of the oil revenues.
01:17So you needed the oil to flow in order to feed the budget and the national budget to
01:23feed every single Libyan, every one of the seven million Libyans.
01:28So if you have these two things, a ceasefire where kids can go to school, and if you have
01:34on top of that the oil flowing almost regularly so the country can live and eat and go to
01:45work as much as possible, then this is something great.
01:49And I should say that together with my deputy and my team, we have been able to produce
01:54that.
01:55We have been able to produce a ceasefire that is holding until this moment, four years later,
02:01and the oil is flowing until this moment.
02:04Now one can think of going a step further, and he should think, and my successors tried
02:11to go a step further, which is to produce an elected, legitimate, democratic government.
02:17This was not possible.
02:19And this brings us to kind of the common thread of what you talk about.
02:22Peace building is so difficult.
02:24I mean, democratic institution building is very difficult.
02:29The ceasefire was difficult, but we produced something original, which is the five plus
02:36five military committee that produced the ceasefire.
02:41Keeping the oil production safe was difficult because a lot of people were interfering with it.
02:47Now it's flowing, and in fact, in the past few years, Libya has signed many new contracts.
02:54Producing a political structure that is at the same time legitimate and democratic is
03:01a much bigger...
03:02A much bigger order.
03:04And at the time there was the complaint, oh, the UN's dysfunctional, the world's nations
03:09that sit at the Security Council can't get along.
03:12Of course, it seems like paradise back then when you compare it to today with the divisions
03:18over Ukraine, the divisions over the Middle East, now divisions even over things like
03:23sending nuclear inspectors to North Korea.
03:25You are pointing to something serious that goes way beyond Libya, as you say.
03:31It is the paralysis of the Security Council.
03:34But I should say something here in defense of the rest of the UN, because the UN is not
03:40only the Security Council.
03:42It's an archipelago of institutions, and some of them are doing a great job.
03:49If you stop today the World Food Program or the UNHCR, millions of refugees, millions
03:55of people who need food would suffer much more than they do right now.
04:02Now the Security Council depends on the will and the trust among great powers.
04:08When you have some level of trust, as we had in the 1990s when the Security Council voted
04:16so many resolutions in order to liberate Kuwait, to punish Iraq, to sanction the occupation
04:22and annexation of Iraq, that was great.
04:25But that trust was lost.
04:27And it was lost, like, 20 years ago, mainly because of George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.
04:35In 2003, the invasion of Iraq, you're saying?
04:37Yes.
04:38The invasion of Iraq.
04:39This is the original sin.
04:40Because since that time, trust has been lost among great powers.
04:44First, every great power wanted to emulate the United States.
04:47If the United States that produced the UN at San Francisco Conference in 1945, that
04:54is looking or saying that it is preaching a rules-based order, international order,
05:00is violating that order by invading without an authorization of the Security Council against
05:05the will of many great powers like France, Germany, Russia, et cetera, why shouldn't
05:11we do the same?
05:12The Russians, a few years later, invaded Georgia and then invaded Ukraine.
05:17Then the Turks started interfering in Libya and Syria and Iraq and Somalia and elsewhere.
05:24And then the Iranians used all their proxies across the Middle East.
05:28When the leading powers do not behave in a certain way and do not have some level of
05:34trust among themselves, yes, the Security Council is in full paralysis.
05:39It doesn't mean that the other parts of the UN are also in a situation of paralysis.
05:44It means that the Security Council, that is the unit within the UN in charge of peace
05:50and security, is not performing well.
05:54And the UN is being put to the test just in the past days with the report coming out about
06:00an internal audit at the UN's Palestinian Relief Agency.
06:03You were mentioning earlier how agencies like the World Food Program are indispensable.
06:09Your thoughts on, in this case, it's Israel, pointing the finger at the UN Relief Agency
06:17saying it has too many Hamas militants in its ranks and countries freezing their aid.
06:25I can tell you with full confidence that Israel has not produced the evidence for that.
06:33And the report written after an inquiry shows that.
06:38Now, there is another thing.
06:40UNRWA, because this is the issue, UNRWA does not serve the Palestinians only in Gaza.
06:46UNRWA serves the Palestinians in the camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
06:51Therefore it is not relying on Hamas there.
06:54So if, and the evidence has not been provided, if there are a few Hamas militants who have
07:00joined the UNRWA in Gaza as drivers or et cetera, this is a possibility.
07:06They don't change the fact that without UNRWA the Palestinian people will suffer much, much
07:12more.
07:13So therefore I am an unconditional supporter of the persistence of UNRWA and a great admirer
07:21of its leader, Philippe Lazzarini.
07:24Is unilateralism taking, trumping the multilateral view?
07:30Sure it is.
07:31That window of opportunity that you mentioned in the 1990s when for a while the UN was the
07:36place where it all happened?
07:38A colleague of mine at Princeton University said that, he wrote a book that was published
07:45a few days before 9-11 so that tells you something, that he said that we are at a crossing point.
07:53We can either leave the world as it is, we can become an isolationist country, the United
08:02States I mean, or we can build what he calls a constitutional order.
08:07This is a moment where there is no big power to challenge the United States.
08:13The United States can take the lead to build a constitutional order, an order that is more
08:19institutional based on trust and on international law.
08:24I think that Clinton to a large extent lost that opportunity by not joining the ICC when
08:30it was produced, the International Criminal Court in 1990.
08:34By not using the fact that all countries of the world, almost all, with a few exceptions
08:42like India, Pakistan and Israel, have accepted that the Treaty on Non-Proliferation be open-ended,
08:51which is a big decision.
08:53That you have 185 countries coming together and saying we will not try to become nuclear
08:59powers.
09:00This is big.
09:01Forever.
09:03Using these positive aspects in order to build a constitutional order.
09:10Many people everywhere were pushing for that.
09:14People like Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, who have been responsible for wars in Vietnam
09:19and Korea and elsewhere, came back and said why don't we consider the possibility –
09:24But when you're the hegemon, there's the temptation to call the shots.
09:27After all, under the same Bill Clinton, the U.S. did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
09:32You pay for it later.
09:34You show your strength today and you pay for it later.
09:38Because when you ask those countries you have compelled to accept your diktat, when you
09:46ask them to vote with you in the General Assembly of the United Nations against Russia, they
09:52say no.
09:53Remember what you did to me last year, five years ago?
09:57Remember what you did in Iraq?
09:59Remember what you did with the ICC?
10:01Remember the fact that you did not consider our help in Kuwait or in Afghanistan enough?
10:10You have been ungrateful.
10:11Now you pay for it.
10:12I'm not going to vote for you.
10:15Therefore there is always a time, if you do not build in peacetime, where there is some
10:21level of trust, if you don't build institutions that are lasting, that you end up paying for
10:28it later.
10:29All right.
10:30So hubris back then.
10:31Your book is called The Temptation of Mars.
10:33And you sort of break up the world – but your cutoff point is not 2003 and the invasion
10:38of Iraq.
10:39Your cutoff point is a little bit later, around 2006.
10:41You say between 2000 and 2006 there's one world, and then after 2006 there's another.
10:47Why?
10:48Why is that your cutoff date?
10:49In 2003 we started with the deregulation of force.
10:52That's Iraq, followed by Georgia, followed by Ukraine, followed by et cetera.
10:56When it comes to deregulation of force, the original sin happened in 2003 in Iraq, in
11:02Baghdad.
11:03When it comes to the democratization wave, what we see is that the democratization went
11:10up and up and up until 2006.
11:14In 2006, this is the first year when we can say there is a plateau.
11:19And after that, we watch a decline in the number of countries becoming democratic.
11:25So 2006 is the breaking point when it comes to democracy versus authoritarianism.
11:31When it comes to globalization, what we can see is that the financial crisis of 2007-2008
11:38in Wall Street is the breaking point.
11:40So depending on the criteria you choose, it is the period between 2003 and 2008 where
11:49the promise of a peaceful world and the reality of a fragmented world was sort of cut off.
11:59The Temptation of Mars, published in French, soon in English?
12:01I hope in English by the fall.
12:04By the fall.
12:05Ghassan Salameh, a pleasure as always.
12:06Thanks so much for joining us.
12:07Thank you.