United Nations:
President Obama warns against isolationism in his final General Assembly speech.
UNITED NATIONS — President Obama used his final address before the United Nations on Tuesday to praise global integration and warn against the impulse to shut it out, calling on Americans and foreigners alike to tear down walls, not build them.
In a sweeping address that touched on the world’s trouble spots — including the 5-year-old civil war in Syria, the refugee crisis stemming from that nation and elsewhere, and creeping authoritarianism in Russia and Eastern Europe — Obama suggested they all are related to each other, and to a drive toward isolationism.
That impulse is selfdefeating, he argued.
“Today, a nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself,” Obama said. “The answer cannot be a simple rejection of global integration. Instead, we must work together to make sure the benefits of such integration are broadly shared and that the disruptions — economic, political and cultural — that are caused by integration are squarely addressed.”
The line also was one of several oblique references to Donald Trump, as a subtext of Obama’s speech was an argument against the Republican presidential nominee’s candidacy.
Each nation can choose to “reject those who appeal to our worst impulses,” Obama also said, “and embrace those who appeal to our best.”
Though Obama asserted that the world is less violent than ever and that billions of people are better off thanks to the integration of the global economy, he argued that to keep moving forward, global integration needs a “course correction” to make sure that all share in prosperity and that justice is applied equally.
Integration also has brought about a collision of cultures, he said. Trade, migration and the Internet challenged people’s identities.
“We see liberal societies express opposition when women choose to cover themselves,” Obama said. “We see protests responding to Western newspaper cartoons, the caricature of the prophet Muhammad. In a world that left the age of empire behind, we see Russia attempting to recover lost glory through force.
“There’s no easy answer for resolving all these social forces,” he said. “But I do not believe progress is possible if our desire to preserve our identities gives way to an impulse to dehumanize or dominate another group.”
U.S. standing in the world is an aberration, Obama noted.
“For most of human history, power has not been unipolar, and the end of the Cold War may have led too many to forget this truth,” he said.