President Obama on Tuesday delivered a thinly veiled warning to the world’s leaders against the aggressive nationalistic and protectionist policies espoused by Donald Trump, and argued that building walls and erecting trade barriers will only hurt U.S. workers and those abroad.
“Today, a nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself,” Obama said in his last speech as president before the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York.
He warned several times against persecuting people of different faiths and cultures, and said the world is at a crossroads, and must choose to either move ahead with global cooperation, or retreat inward.
“We all face a choice,” Obama told world leaders. “We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration, or we can retreat to a world sharply divided and ultimately in conflict along age-old lines” of tribes, religion and cultures.
“I want to convince you today we must go forward, not backward,” he said, touting the principles of democracy, human rights and international law and international institutions like the United Nations.
“So the answer cannot be a simple rejection of global integration,” he continued. “Instead, we must work to ensure that the benefits of global integration are broadly shared.”
The world, he said, is more interconnected than ever through trade, travel and telecommunications, but continuing along this path requires a “course correction.”
“Too often those trumpeting the benefits of globalization have ignored inequality within and among nations, have ignored the enduring appeal of ethnic and sectarian identities, have left international institutions ill-equipped, under-funded [and] under-resourced in order to handle transnational challenges,” he said.
In a more pointed reference to Trump, Obama also warned of the rise of “alternative visions” that reject dependence on international organizations and rules and want to what he characterized as “withdraw from the world.”
He talked about “aggressive nationalism” and “crude populism” that sometimes comes from the “far left” but “more often from the far right.”
This vision, he said, “seeks to restore what they believe was a better, simpler age, free of contamination.” World leaders would make a mistake in ignoring these movements, he said, because they reflect “dissatisfaction among too many of our citizens.”
Ultimately, he predicted, these movements will fail.
“I do not believe those visions can deliver security or prosperity over the long term,” he said.
“I do believe that these visions fail to recognize at a very basic level our common humanity,” he continued. “Moreover I believe the acceleration of travel and technology, and telecommunications, together with a global economy that depends on a global supply chain, makes it self-defeating ultimately for those to seek to reverse this progress.”
