United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein on Friday said that United States President Donald Trump’s speech at Davos in Switzerland would take the world back to the brink of World War I, Reuters reported.
“It’s the script of the 20th century,” al-Hussein said. “He [Trump] urged all countries to pursue their own interest, almost without reference to the fact that if you do all of that, if each country is narrowly pursuing its agenda, it will clash with the agendas of others and we will take the world back to 1913 once again.”
“America is open for business,” Trump had said during his first address to the World Economic Forum at Davos on Friday. Trump not only pitched America as a great place for investors, but also pushed his controversial “America First” policy.
Urging all world leaders to put the interest of their own countries first, he also said that free and open trade will not be possible if some countries “exploit the system at the expense of others”. Free trade needed to be “reciprocal”, he had added.
Such a policy, al-Hussein said, would lead to “it all coming apart at some stage, and people suffering” a lot.
“Ethnic nationalisms, chauvinistic nationalisms, a sense that there is a supremacy within communities determined on the basis of colour or ethnicity, and that others are somehow lesser people, or that certain countries are somehow morally superior to others...That’s what always seems to get us into trouble,” he added.
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