BS Summary: This article contains 1 faulty reasoning type, including Ad Hominem, with Ad Hominem as the most egregious example at 0.2% saturation with 4 hits. Analysis detected 4 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,839 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35.9% and a BS Rank of 22% (12,118 of 15,517 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 78.10% of the article peer group.
When Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered her first major foreign-policy remarks during a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference in February, a moderator asked her whether the United States should send troops to Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.
After some pauses, she said: “What we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s answer reflected long-standing U.S. policy on this thorny issue.
But explaining strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan doesn’t make for a straightforward sound bite, and critics of the 36-year-old congresswoman went on the attack.
“AOC, she was unable to answer a simple question,” U.S.
President Donald Trump said.
The New York Times and Washington Post derided Ocasio-Cortez’s “stumbles,” ditching standard practice to transcribe her “um”s and “ah”s.
National-security experts saw Ocasio-Cortez’s answer as a misstep in part because she has previously been enigmatic about her foreign policy.
She turned down a 2020 invitation to speak in Munich, according to correspondence viewed by Foreign Policy.
At the time, she seemed squarely focused on delivering for her New York district.
Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to appear at this year’s conference came amid growing speculation that she will seek higher office in 2028, whether as a contender for senator or even president.
Munich is a well-known practice stage for ambitious politicians, and her remarks there attempted to define what a progressive U.S. foreign policy might look like under her leadership.
The core question, however, is how she would transform such ideas into policy.
Foreign Policy spoke with 25 current and former advisors, progressive activists, and think tank experts in Ocasio-Cortez’s orbit to map out her views on the Middle East, Latin America, and the world after Trump.
(Ocasio-Cortez declined an interview request for this story.)
As her star rises within the Democratic Party, some clues about her worldview are starting to emerge.
Ocasio-Cortez entered national politics after a stunning primary upset against longtime Rep.
Joe Crowley in 2018.
Backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, she ran a grassroots campaign that rejected money from political action committees and lobbyists.
Her win was a bright spot for progressives and young voters fed up with what they felt was an anemic Democratic Party.
When she took office at 29, Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman to serve in Congress, joining other members of the so-called Squad of leftists challenging Trump during his first term.
She focused her initial efforts in Congress on delivering for her constituents in the Bronx and Queens, but she has always had an interest in global affairs.
Ocasio-Cortez grew up in a Puerto Rican family, and her worldview was shaped by the island’s neocolonial limbo.
“It’s a big part of her identity,” said Pamela Campos-Palma, a national security strategist who previously worked for the Working Families Party, which endorses Ocasio-Cortez.
“When you have that lived reality of less advantaged family members on an island that has a colonial relationship, you understand power.”
The inept U.S. response to natural disasters in Puerto Rico has also contributed to Ocasio-Cortez’s focus on climate justice and her push for a Green New Deal, Campos-Palma said.
Ocasio-Cortez majored in international relations and economics at Boston University and spent a semester in Niger, working at a maternal health clinic and studying microfinance.
“I was able to communicate and learn with people in a very new way and begin to understand what life is like in a developing country,” she told a student newspaper in 2010.
She broke the Ramadan fast at a Nigerien home, which taught her, “no matter what our background, we all have something to share,” Ocasio-Cortez later wrote on Facebook.
Ocasio-Cortez’s initial steps into foreign policy on the campaign trail involved taking a bold position on Israel-Palestine.
In 2018, she described Israel’s killing of more than 60 protesters during Gaza’s Great March of Return as a “massacre” on Twitter.
But in a PBS interview, one of her first national media appearances, she struggled to explain her views on the conflict.
So she called Matt Duss for help.
Duss, then an advisor to Sen.
Bernie Sanders and a Middle East expert who had worked extensively in progressive think tanks, told Ocasio-Cortez to trust her instincts: Israel did massacre Palestinians, he recalled in an interview.
He told her that the blob—that is, the Washington foreign-policy establishment—would pressure lawmakers not to believe their eyes on Palestine or any issue that challenges their monopoly on power, he said.
Duss remained in touch with Ocasio-Cortez’s staff, and top Sanders aide Mike Casca went to work as her chief of staff in 2023.
Duss thinks that the media response to Ocasio-Cortez’s Taiwan line was misguided.
“I get why people are taking the opportunity to criticize the hesitation, but she got to the right answer,” Duss said.
“The more interesting question is, what policy should we pursue to de-escalate, as she said”—not to mention that former President Joe Biden bucked decades of precedent when he said that he would defend Taiwan.
Ocasio-Cortez came into office with more than 3 million followers on Twitter, now X, and today has some 12 million.
Her social media celebrity brought more pressure to get everything right.
An op-ed in the New York Times in 2018, before she was elected, probed the need for progressives to develop new foreign-policy thinking under the headline “What Does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Think About the South China Sea?”
It barely discussed her.
The congresswoman quickly became a foil for centrist Democrats and a caricature of the left’s absence of an international platform.
Meanwhile, members of Trump’s right wing derided her with conspiracy theories and racist venom.
Ocasio-Cortez was quickly assigned to the House Oversight Committee, turning usually staid congressional hearings into viral clips by grilling corporate juggernauts such as Mark Zuckerberg.
Though that role focuses on domestic issues, it has helped her form a framework focused on accountability.
One can imagine Ocasio-Cortez forcing officials of both parties who have pursued reckless wars to face consequences—or working to strengthen adherence to the U.S.
Constitution and United Nations Charter.
In 2019, Ocasio-Cortez brought Campos-Palma to then-NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s joint address to Congress.
He railed against Russian aggression and sought Trump’s support for a defense pact with Ukraine.
Over lunch in the congressional cafeteria with Campos-Palma afterward, Ocasio-Cortez asked what NATO dynamics meant for her constituents.
The congresswoman wanted to figure out how to talk to voters about foreign policy in a way that resonated with the Bronx and Queens; she understood that voters tend to feel checked out from international policies and that progressives have not messaged well on them.
“I hate to say this out loud,” Campos-Palma said, “but when it comes to Russia, Ukraine, and like Palestine, Israel, we’re not winning.
We’re not making gains.”
Ocasio-Cortez began to use her trips abroad to push Democrats to articulate a different way forward.
In 2023, settling into her third term in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez traveled to Brazil, Chile, and Colombia as part of a delegation of Spanish-speaking U.S. representatives.
Though she had visited Denmark in 2019 to promote a global Green New Deal and Japan and South Korea earlier in 2023, her third trip abroad as a member of Congress was “different,” Politico wrote at the time: Rather than meeting chamber-of-commerce types, the delegation connected with leftist leaders, organizers, and activists.
Ocasio-Cortez toured Brasília with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s longtime foreign-policy advisor, Celso Amorim.
She met ministers and mayors and visited a protest encampment of the Landless Workers’ Movement, a grassroots group that has fought for land reform in rural Brazil for decades—applying her organizing background to statecraft.
“She understands in a way that most Democrats in this country don’t, the link between electoral politics and social movements,” said Andre Pagliarini, a historian at Louisiana State University.
In Chile, Ocasio-Cortez toured the home of Salvador Allende, the socialist president who died in a U.S.-backed coup 50 years earlier.
Moved by the photographs and artwork of disappeared activists at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, she said that the United States owed Chile an official apology and pushed for declassifying Nixon administration archives from that period.
The Biden administration ended up releasing some of those key documents.
“These questions of empire and the record of the U.S. in Latin America were things that she was very familiar with and wanted to explore more,” said Alex Main, the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who accompanied Ocasio-Cortez on the delegation.
“Latin America is what it is today in part as a result of U.S. policies in those countries.”
During the trip, Ocasio-Cortez heard about the harms of U.S. sanctions in Latin America, according to aides who traveled with her and spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid insights on the delegation.
Since then, Ocasio-Cortez has continued to highlight the negative effects of sanctions on civilians from Cuba to Venezuela.
In a 2023 statement, she called on Biden to “re-examine policy towards Latin America, and stop contributing to the destabilization that drives migration,” mentioning sanctions on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Since the U.S. capture of Maduro in January, Ocasio-Cortez has lambasted the Trump administration’s intervention in the country.
“It’s about oil and regime change,” she posted on social media.
In 2023, Ocasio-Cortez met with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel on the sidelines of the U.N.
General Assembly, according to a former congressional aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain relationships—a previously unreported meeting.
She has been consistent in her criticism of the U.S. sanctions on Cuba and has amplified her criticism this year as the Trump administration implemented a harsh blockade.
“This is what we’ve seen with Gaza—this is a new era of depravity opened up, where there used to be, or there was this stated commitment on human rights that innocent civilians were almost exempt from the rules of war, from blockades,” Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter.
She has connected Palestine to broader foreign-policy failures of the Washington establishment, such as an overreliance on military interventions and economic sanctions to achieve U.S. aims.
In Munich, Ocasio-Cortez was joined at a press conference by Crow, the Colorado representative.
They advocated a working-class approach to foreign policy.
Crow grew up in a Republican family in Wisconsin and thinks that Ocasio-Cortez’s populist message could get the buy-in of Trump voters.
Polls show that Americans want a less militaristic approach to the world that prioritizes diplomacy, cuts back on sanctions, and scales back the defense budget.
Some Democratic congressional leaders are stuck in the old way of doing foreign policy, which may be why they ceded the antiwar lane to Trump in the 2024 election.
But the deeply unpopular Iran war may provide Ocasio-Cortez a path to lead her party out of the wilderness—in the midterms and beyond.
Eventually, that effort might also help her seek higher office.
“We want to build a new foreign-policy infrastructure and vision,” Crow said, “to put Americans, and working-class Americans in particular, back in charge.”
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