by WorldTribune Staff, July 3, 2017

As Americans were set to celebrate Independence Day, former President Barack Obama was in Indonesia warning against nations that had adopted “an aggressive kind of nationalism” while also taking a shot at his successor.

“It’s been clear for a while that the world is at a crossroads. At an inflection point,” Obama said on July 1 at the Fourth Congress of the Indonesian Diaspora in Jakarta.

According to a report by the Guardian, Obama said the world is confronting issues ranging from inequality to terrorism and some countries – both developed and less developed – had adopted a more aggressive and isolationist stance.

“If we don’t stand up for tolerance and moderation and respect for others, if we begin to doubt ourselves and all that we have accomplished, then much of the progress that we have made will not continue,” he said.

“What we will see is more and more people arguing against democracy, we will see more and more people who are looking to restrict freedom of the press, and we’ll see more intolerance, more tribal divisions, more ethnic divisions, and religious divisions and more violence,” Obama asserted.

Obama also criticized U.S. President Donald Trump for pulling the world’s biggest economy out of the Paris climate agreement.

“In Paris, we came together around the most ambitious agreement in history to fight climate change,” Obama said, adding it was “an agreement that even with the temporary absence of American leadership will still give our children a fighting chance.”

On the same day as Obama’s speech in Jakarta, Trump was saluting American veterans during the “Celebrate Freedom Rally” in Washington, D.C.

“America is a land rich with heroes,” Trump said at the event, which included wounded warriors who are patients at the Walter Reed Medical Center. “We all bleed the same red blood.”

“Since the signing of the Declaration of Independence 241 years ago, America always affirmed that liberty comes from our Creator. Our rights are given to us by God, and no earthly force can ever take those rights away. That is why my administration is transferring power out of Washington and returning that power back where it belongs – to the people,” Trump said.

“Our religious liberty is enshrined in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights. The American founders invoked our creator four times in the Declaration of Independence,” the president said. “Benjamin Franklin reminded his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention to begin by bowing their heads in prayer. Inscribed on our currency are the words: ‘In God We Trust.’ ”

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