Former French Prime Minister: Much of What People Do Drives War, Not Peace

Are we moving closer to war?

On the afternoon of April 18, an event called "Is War Approaching? — De Villepin's On War and Peace" was held at the China World Hotel in Beijing.

Former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin spoke for nearly an hour, laying out how he reads the state of the world. As he sees it, leadership is shifting, and four regions now carry a risk of war: the Middle East; in Asia, the South China Sea, North Korea and the India-Pakistan border; Russia and the European Union; and Libya, Mali and elsewhere in Africa. War is not confined to the military sphere either — in the economy there are trade wars.

"Peace is not simply the end of tense conflict, not simply the resolution of tensions, not something that arrives only when a war ends. Peace itself should be the main goal of everything we do. To get there we need a set of processes, mechanisms and rules; we should all work to bring about shared peace and security. Unfortunately, there are far too few such mechanisms in today's world," de Villepin said.

Against these tensions he offered three principles for moving the international community toward peace: respect for national sovereignty, long-term development, and stability.

After the speech, Li Ruogu, former president of the Export-Import Bank of China; Zhang Baijia, former deputy director of the Party History Research Center of the CPC Central Committee; Zhou Hong, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; and Zhu Chenghu, dean of the Institute for Defense Studies at the National Defense University, offered comments and questions on the book and the talk.

They turned to the question everyone was arguing about: Syria. Zhu Chenghu and Li Ruogu were skeptical of the strikes the United States, the United Kingdom and France had just carried out on Syria over chemical weapons, suggesting the case might be as empty as the U.S. and U.K. claim in 2003 that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction. Li Ruogu went further: "I don't think the Western countries made a serious, careful, thorough investigation of this chemical weapons attack. The evidence confirming that chemical weapons were used does not hold up."

De Villepin disagreed. France, he said, had solid evidence that Syria's Assad regime had used chemical weapons, and the airstrikes were aimed strictly at chemical weapons. "We wanted a surprise strike, not regime change. Our goal was to use the strikes to drive political dialogue and a political transition — that is also why we have been working so hard at the Security Council to push through a new resolution," de Villepin said.

De Villepin, now 65, is a well-known French statesman and diplomat. He was born in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, and grew up in the United States, where as a teenager he absorbed the Beat writers — Jack Kerouac among them — and the hippie movement. He studied literature and law at Sciences Po and France's National School of Administration (ENA). In 1980, at 27, he began his political career, holding posts that included secretary for African affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, head of the information and press office at the French embassy in Washington, first counselor at the French embassy in India, foreign minister, interior minister and prime minister.

In 2003, as France's foreign minister, de Villepin spoke at the UN Security Council on Iraq, opposing the American war as a breach of international law — a stance that won him support in some quarters. He has also been called "the heir to de Gaulle's spirit and the executor of Chirac's ideas." One commentary put it this way: "In an age when foreign ministers are mostly bland party functionaries with no edge to them, de Villepin stands out like a mistake in the calendar. He is a living fossil of the Renaissance statesman — full of passion, widely read; two hundred years ago he might have been a swordsman, a musketeer whose wit cut like a blade. His political ideal is to restore France's glory. He holds a firm belief in a multipolar world and multilateral institutions, insists that law must be the cornerstone of international order under any circumstances, and believes in dialogue and tolerance."

In 2005 de Villepin became prime minister. His path looked clear, and he was seen as the heir to then-president Jacques Chirac. A year later, large numbers of French students turned against an employment bill his government had sent to parliament, and class boycotts spread across the country. With the bill stuck in parliament, de Villepin used the power the French constitution grants a prime minister to force it through. Parliament erupted, his standing collapsed, and with the timing so delicate he sat out the presidential election the following year. His rival inside the party, Nicolas Sarkozy, won it. De Villepin handed in his resignation in 2007, on the last day of Chirac's presidency.

In 2008 Sarkozy sued him for defamation over the "Clearstream affair," and the case took a heavy toll. Not until 2010 did a court clear him. He then left the Union for a Popular Movement, the party he belonged to, and founded his own, Republican Solidarity. In early September 2010 he announced he would run in the 2012 presidential election; in March 2012 he pulled out, unable to gather enough signatures from elected officials. Today he acts as an "envoy" between China and France, promoting economic ties between China and Europe, and advises various institutions.

Besides the statesman and the diplomat, there is de Villepin the man of letters. His books include The Shark and the Seagull, Words of Exile, The Europeans, In Praise of the Fire Thieves and Another World. One of them, a history of Napoleon's last years titled The Hundred Days, or the Spirit of Sacrifice, won the Prix des Ambassadeurs and the Napoleon Foundation Prize. Chirac once said of him: "He grasps a problem astonishingly fast. It is hard to find another man like him — an outstanding poet and an exceptional military commander at once."

In April 2018 de Villepin published a new book in China, On War and Peace (Mémoire de paix pour temps de guerre). In his account, the 20th century promoted a new culture of war; the 21st has opened an era of a new culture of peace. In this era the international community is no longer defined by bilateral relations alone but shaped more and more by multilateral ones. The work of peace has to be carried together: find workable means, build a stable and just new order, write a new chapter of peace, and let the idea of "never again war" take root.

"Around the world we see people making a great deal of effort, and behind it all that effort drives war; far less of it goes into building peace. We need to understand this situation. War always catches people off guard. In 1914, no one expected war to break out. The forces driving war today are already in motion. We should be careful, we should be vigilant, and we should keep in mind that any crisis could appear," de Villepin said.

So that you can hear him directly, we have published excerpts from his remarks below.

Four regions face a risk of war: the Middle East; the South China Sea, North Korea and India-Pakistan in Asia; Russia and the EU; and Libya, Mali and elsewhere in Africa

The ambition of this book is bound up with this particular moment, bound up with the current state of international relations — a very unusual moment. There is at least one main reason for saying so: we are watching a historic turn on the international stage, a change in leadership. Across the world we see leadership shifting in the West, and shifting in the emerging world too. When a change of that size happens, the world stage requires big adjustments from us — in our thinking, in our geopolitics, in the balance of power.

This moment matters. In the past ten years we have not faced a risk of war this large. Four regions are now wrestling with political and military tensions that carry the risk of war.

The first is the Middle East. Many experts say the escalating danger there could amount to the suicide of the Middle East. We also see crises stacked on top of each other — Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya — and a balance of power that has shifted. And let us not forget terrorism.

The risk of war in the Middle East runs through several kinds of conflict. There are tribal tensions, religious conflict, regional powers including Iran and Saudi Arabia, and competition among the global powers. What we need is a limited military action aimed only at chemical weapons, and a political solution. Inside that political solution we need ways to talk about Syria — with Russia, and with big regional powers such as Iran, whose weight in the Middle East is considerable. How do we use diplomacy? Through the UN, through Syria, through the mechanisms in Geneva and Sochi. This calls for countries around the world to have mechanisms for settling the Middle East question.

Asia has its own: tension in the South China Sea, the North Korean crisis. The risk attached to a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong Un will surface too. Some will call it good news, but it may also be the sign of a new risk. Another risk of war is the tension between India and Pakistan. We should watch that region closely.

Then Europe — tension between Russia and the countries of the EU. We can see tension without precedent, driven by sanctions and the like, and tension between the EU and Russia over Poland, Romania and other questions. Both sides are producing conflict, in ideas and in facts on the ground.

In Africa — Libya, Mali, the Sahara — much of the situation is out of control. We need the international community to mobilize hard, to bring friends together to solve these problems.

The risk of war exists in the economy and in trade as well

The risk of war exists in the economy and in trade as well. Trade wars: Trump keeps raising protectionism, and trade tension keeps rising among China, the United States and Europe. They worry about how fast China's economy is growing.

Peace is not simply the end of tense conflict, not simply the resolution of tensions, not something that arrives only when a war ends. Peace itself should be the main goal of everything we do. To get there we need a set of processes, mechanisms and rules; we should all work to bring about shared peace and security. Unfortunately, there are far too few such mechanisms in today's world.

Let me suggest two or three ways to understand the international situation better and improve it. Take financial stability: today we have no way to regulate it. The IMF may be the only organization of its kind in the world, and even its capacity is limited. So I would like to explore with you whether we could create a new regulatory body — a financial G3, bringing together the chair of the Federal Reserve, the president of the European Central Bank and the governor of the People's Bank of China for a G3 financial summit of three major powers. I believe the key institutions of these three important countries could help identify the financial risks the world will face, so that we handle those risks better.

On diplomacy: today we need more than a strong channel for political dialogue. We need respect for a long tradition of cooperation. The United States and Europe have cooperated for a long time, but the stability of the whole world is now decided in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Here we need new ways to talk and to work together — among Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Beijing.

That way we can bring the world's major powers into closer cooperation. That is also why we can use it to promote world peace. Using it as a tool to isolate the United States would be foolish; using it to solve Eurasian problems would be good. Take European security. There has not been a summit on European security since 1975. How is European security to be managed? We have had no such tool since 1975. We need a new tool, a new initiative, a new approach.

Three principles for moving the international community toward peace

From my own experience as a diplomat, and as a politician, one of the keys to peace is getting countries to work by shared principles. Today I want to share three principles that, in my view, can move the international community toward peace.

First, respect for national sovereignty. This is a critical challenge. Over the past ten years the international community has seen many wars and military interventions. We cannot export democracy by force, and we cannot change a regime in an ungentlemanly way. That mistake has been repeated — not only in Afghanistan. In 2003 George W. Bush went into Iraq, which was Tony Blair's mistake as well. The Arab states repeated it in Yemen. France and Britain made the same mistake in Libya.

We should now learn from these failed interventions. Force may be a necessary weapon, but it cannot be used without limits. It must have the right targets, and it must sit inside very strong political and strategic constraints. In settling any crisis, politics should come first; we cannot use violence, or the military, to solve every problem. In a small number of cases military intervention may help, but every use of force has to be politically constrained. If we cannot change the political situation and the balance inside a country or a region — the Middle East, for instance — lasting peace and stability are out of reach.

So we cannot solve problems by parading force. We can start a war, and starting one is easy; ending it is hard, and building peace is complicated and slow. We have to know the condition of every group inside a society. I would put it this way: you can drive Gaddafi from power, but if what replaces his regime is instability and civil war, what then? Look at how people live in Iraq and Libya today. They will tell me life now is not perfect, but better than before — that, at any rate, is the answer we hope to hear.

Once we recognize that, we also need to see that there are failed states, and they are the real enemy. A country whose government has failed produces crises; the crises then deepen at home, deepen inside society, and spill over into neighboring countries. That happened in Somalia, and it happened in the Sahara. So the international community must pay attention to national sovereignty. We have to work with the UN on a mechanism that strengthens state sovereignty and builds up civil administration. How does a country build a peaceful society with the advice and help of the international community and the support of international experts? How do we create a regional or international framework to help these failed states reach long-term stability? This is the most important principle.

Second, long-term development. The problems facing the countries of the world cannot be waved away in a day, a year or even five years; most of them need a long-term strategy. Europe should also build infrastructure projects in Africa. Right now the aid relationship between Europe and Africa looks uncertain, even fearful, because what we face is illegal migration, population growth, terrorism. If we build infrastructure we give Africa new hope, and we gain from Africa's growth as well. If we get stability wrong, we will pay dearly for it.

Third, the principle of stability. If the global community wants to do the work of stability properly, it needs a new mechanism of international governance. The UN has done what it can, but it still cannot deliver the effectiveness we want from it, because we have not innovated enough and have not reformed enough. The Security Council is like a council that cannot see. When it offers the world solutions it lacks legitimacy, because there is no representative of the African Union, no representative of South Africa. So many people do not accept its resolutions. There is also the permanent members' veto: one vote can stop a resolution from passing, and the veto should be used only against crimes against humanity. Political governance, economic governance, financial governance all matter enormously; without them we end up with a polarized world.

At the same time we see tension between authoritarianism and democracy. And some countries can impose their own rules for governing world finance on everyone else, which does not serve the interests of the international community. If we want the world to hold together, if we want to keep it united, we have to step forward and reach better global governance, through negotiation. We also have to weigh justice against efficiency. Over the past several decades, even the past century, the Western world has not grasped the enormous consequences of the injustice and humiliation it has inflicted on the rest of the world — on Russia, for example.

Now we have to rebuild the international community, stop the injustice, and give every country a good experience of it, through dialogue, win-win cooperation and an emphasis on harmony. In many countries harmony is not treated as a goal. Trump believes in America First. If America is to win, there must be a loser. If America loses, it is because some other country somewhere is winning. That is Trump's mindset, and that is why he has turned to protectionism and trade barriers. I think we are still missing one thing: imagination. Culture can play that part, drawing new principles together, and our world can then reach a bigger and better peace.

Did the Syrian government really use chemical weapons?

Syria today and Iraq in 2003 are very, very different, and the two have no connection at all. On one side, the U.S. and the U.K. once misled the international community by claiming Iraq held weapons of mass destruction. But with Syria we have to face the reality, as President Macron has said, that we have solid evidence chemical weapons were used, solid evidence the Assad regime used them. Given that, and given the state of the international community, the use of chemical weapons is absolutely unacceptable. I have also mentioned the 1925 protocol, the 1993 international convention and the 2013 UN resolution: there is no justification for using chemical weapons, and we cannot accept the use of any of them.

Where does the legitimacy of a military intervention like this come from? It is true we have not seen a new UN resolution authorizing the use of force, because the Security Council has been stalled by the opposition of certain countries, chiefly Russia, which has used its veto again and again on Syria.

From where I stand, France took a compromise: there is no better solution to Syria, and the French president needed to pursue two important goals. The first was to make the message to the Assad regime unmistakable — that we will never accept the use of chemical weapons, that we are prepared to use military intervention, but aimed precisely at chemical weapons and their use. That was the goal of our three airstrikes, and the targets were strictly limited to chemical weapons.

The other goal may matter more: the political one. France never wanted a military strike like this to stay hidden. We do not believe force can solve the problem — our hopes rest on political means. So we wanted a surprise strike, not regime change. We were not trying to push Assad out by military intervention; our goal was to use the strikes to drive political dialogue and a political transition, which is also why we have been working so hard at the Security Council to push through a new resolution.

We want an international mechanism that jointly opposes and bans the use of chemical weapons. We want a political process that moves Syria toward a settlement. We also want a military component written into the resolution: if chemical weapons are used again, we may use force again. But our goal is to use the airstrikes to solve the problem. We should be talking with Russia and Iran to find common ground, and solve the problem together with every country in the region.

After the Second World War, how do we find a mechanism that keeps the peace?

First, on judging whether chemical weapons have been used, I think an independent international body should make the assessment, rather than each country relying on the conclusions of its own intelligence services. On Syria we watched one mechanism, the UN's, get blocked, with Russia using its veto to obstruct it. I also believe it would have been better to gather the evidence, reach a conclusion on whether the chemical weapons convention had been violated, and only then strike — but that was not possible. We saw the crisis unfold in Douma, and only then did Britain, France and the United States turn to military means. We should of course find a global mechanism that cannot be criticized, because it is impartial and independent, and that can tell us whether the convention has been violated or whether this is only a rumor.

In the Iraq case, I remember a UN inspection told us there were no weapons of mass destruction, and the U.S. and the U.K. said there were. So we have to build technical bodies of this kind, including for the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The same applies to the North Korean nuclear question: once the U.S. and South Korea have held talks, we have to decide who will tell us whether these nuclear weapons have been destroyed and dismantled. A technical body doing inspections is not enough. We also need a more effective Security Council. On many questions the Council is now powerless and blocked, and that blocking is treated as an important way of protecting one's own interests. But we have to face a fact: in some situations the obstruction we run into threatens the stability and safety of our planet. That is why, in recent years, it has been proposed that the permanent members' veto be suspended when we face atrocities, crimes against humanity — Syria is one such case. In situations like that, the veto should be suspended.

The Security Council should be built on a more reasonable structure. Its five permanent members today include no one from Africa and no one from South America; the permanent membership should be more inclusive. The Council cannot send troops directly, and even when troops are necessary it cannot deploy them quickly — but that is what we need. A peacekeeping force should be placed under the Security Council for rapid deployment: not merely troops drawn from different countries, but an effective force with a shared cultural background, able to move fast into different regions. We need to be able to send peacekeepers to Nigeria, to Mali, to any country. Their job is to rebuild a society, so they need humanitarian skills, they need health protection and medical capacity, they should have experience of that kind, and they need to have lived that culture. We should build a force like this and place it under the Security Council, so it can deploy faster and do more.

Those are some of my proposals. We should not get stuck in the situation as it stands. We should reform, and build a global governance mechanism that makes us quicker and more effective.

We may be facing the most dangerous May in decades

Around the world we see people making a great deal of effort, and behind it all that effort drives war; far less of it goes into building peace. We need to understand this situation. War always catches people off guard. In 1914, no one expected war to break out. War can arrive while we are fast asleep. Historians see clearly that there was a rising alliance of authoritarian powers that, in a sense, made the war happen — and yet no one truly understands how that war came about.

After the First World War we saw many new peace agreements — agreements that brought Germany a great deal of defeat and humiliation, which inevitably produced a new generation of resistance and new risks to peace. So we also need to understand that forces like those are at work today. The factors driving war are already moving. We should be careful, we should be vigilant, and we should keep in mind that any crisis could appear.

The Syrian crisis could open the door to a much larger war. So could North Korea. I am very worried about what happens next there. Will the meeting between Trump and North Korea's leader go smoothly? Can it push the problem toward a solution? Or will the meeting, whether or not it happens, simply give the United States a pretext — one they may use one day to strike North Korea? Iran faces a similar crisis today, and we may be facing the most dangerous May in decades. Mid-May is the anniversary of Islamic State terrorism. With the move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, we can see the United States making its decision: whether to accept the agreement the international community has reached with Iran, or to reject it. If the United States rejects the nuclear non-proliferation agreement with Iran, could a new round of negotiations follow — including a new round with North Korea? And if the American approach is to sign an agreement and then reject it, will North Korea trust the United States? Kim Jong Un might well say: you do not even respect the agreement with Iran, so how would you respect ours?

So once an agreement like that is torn up, no future peace agreement will be trusted again. This is an extremely dangerous month, and it is also the month in which we will see the leaders of North Korea and the United States meet for the first time in years — a meeting that will help decide the world's future. The decisions we make now, including those made in the coming weeks, may decide whether humanity's future is war or peace. War would take everyone by surprise; it could break out simply because of the alliances and mechanisms between states. No one wants to see it, but we need to understand these risks and watch them closely — and not only diplomats, experts and thinkers. Citizens of every kind need to work at making sure the war does not happen.

Cover image: a still from the BBC's War and Peace (2016), via Douban