Former Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a lecture at the prestigious Rhode Island college Brown University yesterday on the subject of international affairs. It was the 94th Ogden memorial lecture (which is a big deal, apparently), and he discussed, amongst other, less interesting things, the topics of Brexit, Vladimir Putin, and, inevitably, the you-know-who He Who Shall Not Be Named President of the United States. 2,400-ish audience members attended the sold-out symposium.
Cameron tackles Trump and making America great again
During his lecture, Cameron talked a little on what it’s like to be an ex-Prime Minister.
He said that one plus side of no longer being in office is that he doesn’t have to listen to recordings of Donald Trump’s conversations from his wiretapped office in Trump Tower. “Just to be clear, that’s a joke,” he very quickly clarified in an age where information rockets around social media at the speed of light and the alternative facts-loving President would have an all-caps response trending within moments.
According to a news report of the lecture published in Rhode Island paper The Providence Journal, Cameron also discussed the possibility that the US and the UK are not the kind of superpower they used to be, and have instead become the bad guys (like Anakin Skywalker), because 2016 flipped the script: Trump was elected riding on a wave of ideas like shutting out Muslims and immigrants and walling off the country, and Britain voted to leave the European Union and branch off on its own.
Cameron says that nationalism and isolation in these senses are not the way forward, but rather tolerance is, and we’re not getting much of that from The Donald.
Cameron made a Berlin Wall comparison
As Trump prepares to build his own Berlin Wall between the US and Mexico (and, as he told Jesse Watters on “Watters’ World” on Fox News Channel, they’ve got “some great designs coming in”), Cameron made reference back to its destruction back in 1989.
He said that after Mr. Gorbachev tore down that wall, “it felt a bit like all the big arguments were over,” and that the need for “more democracies,” “more rule of law,” “free enterprise,” “free trade,” and “NATO” became very apparent.
But they’re going out the window very quickly. Trump has banned lobbying, for example, and he says that NATO has become outdated.
His “America first” policy and our EU leave will put restrictions on international trade. All these values, so clear-cut back then, are rapidly fading. Cameron said that these morals, and also the need “to stand up to aggression” and to “invest in the United Nations,” in this day and age, are “under debate.”
Cameron says that, back in those days, the US and the UK were “the guardians of freedom, of tolerance, of equality and, yes, of justice,” but now we’re the ones threatening those things. He had a sly quip at Trump when he said that only when we “fight” for these ideologies will we truly “be great again.” He also quotably said, “Far from being in retreat, democracy has been on the march.” Picture that on a big brass statue of David Cameron in Hyde Park.
