My Take | If nothing else, at least Trump understands the folly of ‘empire’
The Republican candidate may not be everyone’s pick for US president, but he does know that adventurism only ends in tears – for America and the world
Donald Trump gets a lot of things wrong, but there is at least one thing much of the rest of the world can agree on with him: the United States is in no position to lecture other countries about civil liberties or human rights.
“When it comes to civil liberties, our country has a lot of problems, and I think it’s very hard for us to get involved in other countries when we don’t know what we are doing and we can’t see straight in our own country,” the US Republican presidential nominee said recently in an interview with The New York Times.
How refreshing – and honest! Sometimes, it takes a con man to spot a real big con.
He went on: “We have tremendous problems when you have policemen being shot in the streets, when you have riots, when you have Ferguson [and] Baltimore.
“When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger ... don’t know that we have a right to lecture. We have to fix our own mess.”
America loves to tell other people how to do things, and if they don’t meet its approval, it sometimes intervenes militarily – all for their own good.