President Obama called on world leaders to unite to defeat violent extremism throughout the world, imploring them to renew their commitment to international cooperation to help counter a variety of other world crises from the Ebola outbreak to Russian aggression.
“We can renew the international system that has enabled so much progress,” Obama told a gathering of world leaders Wednesday at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. “Or we can allow ourselves to be pulled back by an undertow of instability.”
Acknowledging a “pervasive unease in our world,” Obama said world leaders gather together “at a crossroads between war and peace; between disorder and integration; between fear and hope.”
The defining question at the root of many of the world’s problems is “whether the nations here today will be able to renew the purpose of the U.N.’s founding and whether we will come together to reject the cancer of violent extremism.”
The international organizations, such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization, have not kept pace with some of the most complex problems facing a more interconnected world, he argued.
“Too often, we have failed to enforce international norms when it’s inconvenient to do so,” he said. “And we have not confronted forcefully enough the intolerance, sectarianism, and hopelessness that feeds violent extremism in too many parts of the world.”
An outbreak of Ebola overwhelms public health systems in West Africa, and threatens to move rapidly across borders, while Russian aggression in Europe is recalls the day when large nations trampled smaller ones in the pursuit of “territorial ambition” and the brutality of terrorists in Syria and Iraq “forces us to look into the heart of darkness,” he said.
Despite these challenges, America is choosing hope over fatalism and is choosing to work for the world “as it should be, as our children deserve it to be,” he said.
Obama acknowledged that the United States has its own problems and too often has failed to live up to its ideals of freedom, democracy and tolerance.
In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, he said the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Mo., – “where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.”
“So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions,” he said. “And like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization and greater diversity with the traditions that we hold dear. “
Instead of cowering from the international scrutiny, Obama said America welcomes it because it is a country that has “steadily worked to address our problems and make our union more perfect.”
“America is not the same as it was 100 years ago, 50 years ago, or even a decade ago,” he said.
The country, he said, has worked to hold leaders accountable, still insists on a free press and an independent judiciary and relies on respect for the rule of law while striving to create to be a place where people of every race and religion can live peacefully and pursue their dreams.
“After nearly six years as president, I believe that this promise can help light the world.”
“At this crossroads, I can promise you that the United States of America will not be distracted or deterred from what must be done,” he said. “We are heirs to a proud legacy of freedom, and we are prepared to do what is necessary to secure that legacy for generations to come. I ask that you join us in this common mission, for today’s children and tomorrow’s.”
This story was first published at 10:40 a.m. and has been updated.
