The popular former New Zealand prime minister spoke at Yale College's Class Day on Monday (Australian time), the undergraduate arm of the prestigious Ivy League university.
Dame Jacinda, who has lived in the US as a Harvard-based fellow since late 2023, said she opted against "the usual pep talk that perhaps you might expect" in an address witnessed by thousands.
"Suddenly didn't feel enough. Not when the world, over the course of a few short months, moved from tumultuous to an all-out dumpster fire," she said.
"There's the war in the Middle East and Europe, with both leaving questions over our sense of humanity.
"The daily reminder of climate change that bangs on our door but falls on deaf ears at the highest echelons of power.
"Challenges to rules around trade, increases in migration flows, and a decreasing regard for civil rights and human rights, including the right to be who you are."
Dame Jacinda said the world stood at an "inflection point in global politics", fuelled by post-pandemic economic challenges, when politicians needed to care for the most vulnerable.
"Some of the greatest leaders here in the United States have recognised that amongst all of the challenges politicians face, they must meet the most basic needs of their citizens, first and foremost," she said.
"FDR (former president Franklin D Roosevelt) said in 1944 while still governing a country at war, 'true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made'."
Dame Jacinda supported unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, appearing at party events.
In a thinly veiled attack on Trump's America First economic doctrine, Dame Jacinda said isolationism was an "illusion".
"You cannot remain untouched by the impacts of infectious disease. A trade stand-off can never just hurt your competitors," she said.
"A warming planet does not produce extreme weather that respects borders, and far-flung wars may not take the lives of your citizens but it will take away their sense of security and humanity.
"We are connected. We always have been."
The 44-year-old said "to be outwardly looking is not unpatriotic" and "in this time of crisis and chaos, leading with empathy is a strength".
Dame Jacinda has become a worldwide poster child for empathetic leadership since her response to New Zealand's worst modern-day mass shooting, the Christchurch Mosques massacre, in 2019.
Since leaving office, she has made few incursions back into public life, but is expected to expand on her time in office in her memoir, A Different Kind of Power, released in June by Penguin Random House subsidiary Crown.
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