Book Reflection: "The Temptation of Mars: War and Peace in the 21st Century" with H.E. Minister Ghassan Salamé

As part of the 2025 Beirut Security Debates (BSD), the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy & International Affairs (IFI) at the American University of Beirut and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) held a Book Reflection on "The Temptation of Mars: War and Peace in the 21st Century," with H.E. Minister of Culture Ghassan Salamé, moderated by Institute Director Joseph Bahout. The discussion took place on Tuesday, April 8, 2025.

About the Event:

While the end of the Cold War and the 1990s seemed to offer the world a perspective of peaceful and positive globalization, where wars and conflict could pave the way to an era of transnational and multilateral cooperation and global governance, the 21st century is proving this promise wrong. The use of force, preemptive wars, cross-border aggressions, and blatant breaches of basic humanitarian laws and laws of war have become frequent, and almost regular, since 2003. Is War back to our political normalcy, as a means to settle disputes, replacing collective security by law and norms with an unlimited use of military force as the sole and predominant language in international relations? What has led to this global and collective setback, and how do we address this new trend, which could threaten world security once again?

​In his latest book, “La tentation de Mars: Guerre et paix au XXIe siècle” (The Temptation of Mars: War and Peace in the XXIst Century; Fayard, 2024), Salamé draws the contours of the new global chessboard, based upon a quarter of a century of experience in international organizations. The discussion used the book as a basis for a wider debate about today’s world fractures and trends, with a special focus on the Middle East, where war has been reshaping the region for a long while, amidst talks of new dynamics of normalization and redistribution of power.