Bill Clinton warns current trend could take us 'to the edge of our destruction'

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton is warning that the trend toward nationalism is, in his words, "taking us to the edge of our destruction."

He made the comments on March 9 during a Brookings Institution event celebrating the release of a new book titled 'Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman' by Israeli scholar and former diplomat Itamar Rabinovich.

According to Politico, Clinton said, "People who claim to want the nation-state are actually trying to have a pan-national movement to institutionalize separatism and division within national borders all over the world...It's like we're all having an identity crisis at once. It is the inevitable consequence of the economic and social changes which have occurred at an increasingly rapid pace."

He went on to say, "...we have to find a way to bring simple, personal decency and trust back to our politics."

Clinton later added, in part, "It's is a very old story and it always comes down to two things...are we going to live in an us-and-them world, or a world that we make together?"

After talking about Rabin's efforts to join people together, Clinton said, "If you got that, in every age and time, eventually, the challenges we face can be resolved in a way to keep us going forward, instead of taking us to the edge of our destruction."

Rabin, Israel's former Prime Minister, was assassinated by a nationalist extremist in 1995 after trying to work towards peace with the Palestinians.