Madeleine Albright: Trump’s Message Should Not be ‘America First but America as a Partner’

Tuesday at the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Passing the Baton event, President Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright criticized President-elect Donald Trump’s “America First” policy.

On Trump’s use of Twitter, Albright said, “I’m going to try to be polite. Let me just say that I am very concerned about the tweets and generally about the messages that are going out.”

Albright continued, “And if I could say, Secretary Kerry said I invented the term ‘indispensable nation.’ Actually President Clinton did. I said it so often it became identified with me. But there is nothing about that term that says alone. It means that the United States needs to be engaged. I think that that is a message I think we need to get out there, not as ‘America First,’ but as America as a partner. There is nothing wrong with partnerships. I know Americans don’t like the word multilateralism. It has too many syllables and ends in an ism. The bottom line is all it means is partnership and understanding the world as we see it in terms of what you call the global issues out there, whether it’s terrorism or global diseases or nuclear proliferation, those issues require partnerships.”