Last week, former president Jimmy Carter gave an important speech at a little liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. He urged America to become a “champion for peace.”
“I think that’s one of the characteristics of a superpower,” said Carter. (Read more in William Landaur’s article Ex-President Carter at Lafayette College: U.S. failing to promote peace)
(The 7-minute video above is a segment of a much longer video of the speech and the question and answer period that followed, which included a candid discussion about North Korea.)
Carter, the 39th President of the United States, delivered Lafayette College’s inaugural Robert and Margaret Pastor Lecture in International Affairs on April 22 in Easton, PA. (Bob Pastor was national security advisor on Latin America and the Caribbean under Carter.)
President Carter clearly identified that the U.S. has been in a constant state of war since the end of World War II. He named off the dozens of countries the U.S. has been formally at war with and the many that the U.S. has waged illegitimate war on.
He recalled the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the U.S. helped create in 1948 (thanks to Eleanor Roosevelt) and that the U.S. is currently in violation of 10 of the 30 principles — specifically noting illegal detentions at Guantanamo Bay prison and using drones to commit targeted assassinations.
He also addressed climate change and the international environmental treaties that have fallen into disrepair, since President Bush Senior.