AOC Makes Her Big Foreign Policy Debut, Falls Flat on Her Face
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 primary win over Joe Crowley and her 2023 Munich Security Conference debut exposed cringe-worthy gaps in foreign policy expertise. In a Firing Line interview, she stammered through vague responses on Israel-Palestine, admitting inexperience despite earlier claims. At Munich, tutored by left-wing Christian Zionist Matt Duss, she parroted NATO orthodoxy but botched Taiwan, hesitating 30 seconds before defaulting to "strategic ambiguity." Her reliance on establishment talking points and inability to deliver clarity—even after preparation—undermines her credibility amid presidential ambitions. [Automatically generated summary]
Anybody who spends any amount of time online, which includes not only myself, but also by definition, you, dear viewer, is probably familiar with the term cringe and not just the term, but what it actually means.
And although it's kind of typically discussed as some new internet term that has been repurposed and popularized, it's actually been around for several centuries, come from old English, really never changed in its meaning, which basically indicates the experience of feeling embarrassment for somebody else, secondhand embarrassment, typically because the person you're watching is doing something that is embarrassing, but they don't actually know that it's embarrassing.
And you feel this kind of internal discomfort as a result.
And there are a lot of things that have caused me to feel cringe over the years, probably none more frequently than when AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New York, tries to talk about foreign policy.
At best, she like barely skates by without some kind of a disaster.
And it's like watching a high wire act.
You're just petrified that the person's going to fall over and crash or anticipating that they will with excitement.
And so it ranges from like just barely surviving to an absolute disaster and maybe ranges in between.
And this has been true basically from the very first time that she emerged on the political scene back in 2018 when she shocked the political world by defeating a man named Joe Crawley, who despite being unknown to essentially everybody outside his family, including the people in the Queen's district that he represented for many, many years, was actually one of the main power brokers within the Democratic Party, number three to Nancy Pelosi.
She considered him a likely successor to her when she finally waddled away and retired with her stock portfolio.
And so typically Democrats like that don't lose in primaries, and yet she won.
And the fact that it was such a stunningly surprising victory that she had taken out a senior member of the senior leadership, but also her youth and obviously her appearance and what we, I think it acknowledges kind of a inherent charisma for media led huge numbers of national media figures who never heard of her until she won to descend upon her and want to interview her and elevate her.
And that's what led to this overnight fame.
They really found her irresistible.
One of the issues that she featured in that primary campaign, I wouldn't say centrally featured or emphasized most, but certainly featured prominently was her criticism of Israel and her support for the Palestinian cause.
And more generally, and this is what really attracted my attention to her before anyone really knew who she was, other than a handful of political reporters following this, was the fact that she was highly critical of the Democratic Party for its support for Israel and its indifference to, if not hostility toward the suffering of Palestinians.
And so this is an issue that she had made part of her campaign.
And one of the interviews that she accepted for some reason, someone advised her to accept was on Firing Line.
It's on PBS and it's hosted by Margaret Hoover.
And Firing Line has been a program that's kind of legendary or historic, storied as this showed where you go on and you really get confronted by high level discourse.
I'm not saying that was really what it is, but that's always how it's been described.
You can actually go back and watch 1960s and 1970s episodes when it was hosted by William F. Buckley.
And I do think you can acknowledge that it was much higher level than our typical political shows where these politicians go on cable or Sunday morning TV or whatever.
But she's trying to replicate it Margaret Hoover is and she's a very establishment figure.
She's married to this man named John Avalon.
And they both come from very wealthy family.
She's a descendant of President Hoover.
He is, I think, of some wealthy New York family.
He's been on CNN.
He ran for Congress as this Democratic Party centrist in the last cycle and lost.
But they're very much a kind of couple that's a creature of establishment Washington.
And so she was interviewing AOC with kind of a skeptic eye, but also very gently, almost like affectionately, like, hey, welcome to the club.
Just want to kind of ask you some questions.
And when she got to the part about foreign policy, AOC completely collapsed in ways that are almost historic in terms of watching a politician just fall completely flat on their face as part of the national debut.
So here is the part where Margaret Hoover asks AOC about her views on Israel and just watch where it goes.
Major Trip Abroad Planned00:14:25
But I haven't seen anywhere.
What is your position on Israel?
Well, I believe absolutely in Israel's right to exist.
I am a proponent of a two-state solution.
And for me, it's not, this is not a.
Always good to start with a couple clichés that you've heard like on the news or in the papers.
Like, I believe in Israel's right to exist.
I'm a huge proponent of the two-state solution.
Love the two-state solution.
And then it goes downhill quickly from there.
A referendum, I think, on the state of Israel.
For me, the lens through which I saw this incident as an activist, as an organizer, if 60 people were killed in Ferguson, Missouri, if 60 people were killed in the South Bronx, unarmed, 60 people were killed in Puerto Rico.
I just looked at that incident more through just as an incident.
And to me, it would just be completely unacceptable if that happened on our shores.
But I am, of course, the dynamic there in terms of geopolitics and the wars is very different than people expressing their First Amendment right to protest.
Well, yes, but I also think that what people are starting to see, at least in the occupation of Palestine, is just an increasing crisis of humanitarian condition.
And that to me is just where I tend to come from on this issue.
You used the term the occupation of Palestine.
What did you mean by that?
So in the world of people like Margaret Hoover, at least back then in 2018, there is no such thing as an occupation of Palestine.
This is an invented fantasy from radicals who are either too supportive of the Palestinian cause or too hostile toward Israel, probably because they're anti-Semites.
So AOC comes in thinking that's a term that you just throw around because everybody accepts it.
And yet Margaret Hoover doesn't agree that this term even exists.
But she's look at how gentle she's being.
She's just saying, hey, hey, would you mind just telling me what you mean by that?
And it's this gentlest prodding that causes the whole thing to just smash and fall apart.
Oh, I think what I meant is like the settlements that are increasing in some of these areas and places where Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes.
I mean, it's just, it's not even that it's so wrong as an answer.
It's just stated in such a defeated way.
Like she, when she was asked what she meant, she was like, oh, oh.
And she was like, kind of like a ninth grade student searching for the right answer, standing in front of the class.
And then it was apparent she didn't have it, kind of stammered for quite a while and then just gave this very like timid answer, even more so with like a very timid posture and timid voice.
It was very clear she had no idea what she was talking about.
And Margaret Hoover wasn't being so gentle that she was just going to let her off the hook.
She pressed a little bit more.
Do you think you can expand on that?
Yeah, I mean, I think I'd also just, I am not the expert on geopolitics.
Look at that face.
That's like really.
On this issue.
You know, for me, I'm a firm believer in their housing and homes.
Do you think you can expand on that?
Yeah, I mean, I think I'd also just, I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue.
Oh, you would, you don't say, say, no, we would never have known that.
Thank you for admitting that.
I'd love to know your, on what specific foreign policy issue are you the geopolitical expert?
She's like, I'm not the geopolitical expert on this issue.
You know, for me, I'm a firm believer in finding a two-state solution in this issue.
Back to the cliche, the safe cliche.
I'm happy to sit down with leaders on both of this issue, on both of these.
For me, I just look at things through a human rights lens.
And I may not use the right words.
I know this is.
There's that face again.
All right.
So to be totally honest, I didn't really think that much of that at the time.
It was obviously very embarrassing.
But she's newly elected to the Congress, not even serving in the Congress yet.
Nobody can be an expert about everything.
And she probably just should have said that when asked.
But because she had made it part of her campaign, because she went around pontificating about it so kind of self-righteously, obviously you expect her to have like at least a basic understanding of this topic.
And she kind of got forced into admitting that she just didn't.
And again, had she just said like, look, you know, I grew up in New York.
I focus on the domestic policy issues to the extent it was foreign policy.
It might have been issues like near to home.
So this is an issue that's very complex.
I'm learning about it.
I think people would have actually found that admirable.
But that's not what happened.
She posed as being this like expert and then quickly got exposed as knowing essentially nothing.
But okay, that was the old AOC.
That was the young AOC.
We now have a much more serious AOC, a more responsible AOC, an AOC who's vying to be a national political leader.
And knowing that if you want to be a national political leader, not just a leader of the left wing on domestic causes in the House representing Queens, but you want to vie for Chuck Schumer's Senate seat in New York or even run for president, you obviously have to establish your gravitas and your bona fides when it comes to foreign policy.
You can't be completely ignorant of foreign policy, never pronounce on it except when forced to by people harassing you on an escalator and you just kind of spit out some bromides.
You have to be conversant in it.
You have to study it.
You have to understand it and develop a worldview.
So AOC apparently believes that she's now ready to unveil her sophisticated foreign policy view because she announced that she's going to go to the Munich Conference, which is an annual meeting of Western foreign policy elites focusing on NATO and the transatlantic alliance and issues important to Europe and the U.S.
And it's primarily a security conference, a security conference about foreign policy.
And AOC made of this big showing, this big flamboyant announcement about how she's now ready for her first major international trip where she's going to speak on her on AOC's worldview of foreign policy.
And here's how it was pitched by some very friendly outlets, beginning with the New York Times.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez steps onto a wider stage.
The progressive leader is taking a larger role in democratic politics, supporting moderate candidates and helping drive the party's economic message.
Now she is planning a major trip abroad, not just a trip abroad, a major, major, major trip abroad.
AOC is ready to go out into the world and introduce herself and her foreign policy experience.
This is just from a couple of days ago.
The Munich conference was yesterday where she appeared, which is the cause of this video.
So just to give you a few more details from this scene setting article from New York Times, next week she plans to expand her progressive pitch to foreign policy by speaking at the Munich Security Conference in her most significant overseas trip since taking office.
According to Mike Kaska, her chief of staff, her most like what are her other significant foreign, this would be her only significant foreign policy trip that I can remember.
There at the Munich conference, AOC is expected to present a left-wing alternative to Mr. Trump's shoot-from-the-hip approach to world affairs.
Her heightened role comes as Democratic leaders whispered that she might challenge Tuck Schumer or run for president.
And then the New York Times adds, the trip is Ms. Ocasio's court, Ms. Ocasio's Cortez's most significant foray into foreign policy, a subject that has never been a particular strength of hers.
What a generous way to put that.
The Munich Conference is typically the realm of national security officials and heads of state.
She has been receiving regular briefings from the Center for International Policy, a left-wing foreign policy think tank in Washington.
And Matt Duss is basically the one who has been tutoring her.
And that's the word that the New York Times uses.
Now, she's been going to school for foreign policy.
She's preparing.
No one says AOC doesn't do her homework.
She goes to class.
She studiously takes notes, very respectful to her teachers.
She gets home before dinner.
She studies, reviews her notes before sleep.
She's a diligent student, and she's been getting tutored on foreign policy before her major foreign policy trip.
Now, Matt Duss is this sort of figure that's been floating around Washington forever.
He was Bernie Sanders' foreign policy advisor and now is AOC's.
He's kind of the go-to left-wing foreign policy expert, but he's just very kind of, he orients them to this very status quo, perpetuating, establishment-pleasing stand, which is the one that he has.
He's long identified as a Christian Zionist, very much a supporter of Israel, but also a critic of Israel.
So that's essentially the shtick that Bernie and AOC are doing.
We're against Israel because it has a right, far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
And once that government is gone, we can then go back to Israel.
AOC rather infamously voted against Marjorie Taylor Green's amendment to end all foreign aid to Israel, including for Iron Dome.
And so AOC is constantly trying to navigate this middle area while sounding like radical, which is basically AOC's entire political existence.
Here is, just to give you a little bit more sense about the media environment they tried to create before her trip, this is from the Independent.
AOC is pushing the Democrats to take her seriously.
Her Munich, Munich could launch her rebirth.
Once seen as an insurgent, AOC has become a team player for the Democratic Party.
That's how she's grown up.
She's a team player.
Eric Garcia writes, now she wants to remake what that team looks like.
So, all right, this is AOC.
She's going into this, her main event, her big event, where she's being interviewed by a European journalist about her foreign policy views.
And a lot of what she was saying was just standard, kind of bipartisan, swampy pre-Trump DC conventional wisdom on the importance of NATO and transatlantic alliances and the need to project strength and not to withdraw from the world.
It's just like very standard Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, even like Bush era foreign policy, the thing that made the foreign policy community just utterly feel repelled by Trump when he began questioning things like NATO and the transatlantic alliance.
She talked about how he's trying to colonize Greenland, very European pleasing stuff, but very like the opposite of radical.
But, you know, so she just basically stuck to those cliches.
But then she was asked about a topic that you would obviously be expected to ask about if you're just even going to like a high school class on foreign policy and you were a guest speaker, you would be expected to ask about this, let alone the Munich Security Conference.
They asked her about her views on the U.S.-China relationship and specifically what has long been the most important issue defining that relationship for decades, which is the issue of Taiwan and the posture of the United States, which has sort of been one of intentional ambiguity about whether it would intervene in a war to defend Taiwan if China attacked.
But it's basically assumed that the U.S. would.
Joe Biden was the first president since Nixon created this doctrine to just come out and say multiple times, oh, yeah, we would actually militarily defend China.
And then his White House had to walk it back, pretending that he didn't mean to say it, even though he said it multiple times.
Nancy Pelosi made very provocative moves toward the Chinese, including doing a state visit to Taiwan that treated Taiwan as this completely sovereign state.
Democrats are quite hawkish on the issue of Taiwan, much more so than Trump has been.
And AOC was asked about this.
Hey, not like some obscure, complicated question, but just, hey, what are your views on whether the U.S. should intervene militarily in the event that China attacked Taiwan?
And I actually think this is worse than that 2018 debacle when she spoke about the occupation of Palestine.
Listen to what happened here.
And again, I'm just trigger warning.
This is cringe.
It will make you feel embarrassment.
But I haven't seen anywhere.
Should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?
You know, I think that.
Watch how long it takes her to actually spit out something other than a guttural noise.
Like, ah, ooh, like until she actually starts speaking coherent phrases, at least, not even sentences, but just speaking coherently.
I mean, it really takes a long time, like 25 to 30 seconds.
You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a.
What are your views on Taiwan, AOC?
This is, of course, a very long-standing policy of the U.S.
Oh, thank you so much.
This is a long-standing policy of the U.S. What is?
What's the long-standing policy?
She's searching around for Matt Duss's index cards and tutoring on this question.
She can't find it.
Her brain can't find it.
She didn't memorize it.
So first she starts just using like stall words, but I mean, for a really long time, I've done, you know, countless interviews and appearances and speeches and debate.
I don't think in my entire life, it's ever taken me 20 to 25 seconds to stop stammering and just start speaking in coherent sentences.
I've never seen this happen.
Peter Thiel does it, but he's very open about the fact that it's his autism that causes it.
He just like frequently is asked a question and he'll just stammer for 30 to 40 seconds.
But AOC doesn't have autism, at least as far as we know.
And this, this, the thing, the amazing thing is this is not some like really obscure question that you would understand her not being prepared to answer.
Like, hey, what do you think about there's a lot of accusations of corruption in the opposition party in Paraguay?
Avoiding Stumbles in Speech00:04:02
What are your views on that?
Or like, there's increasing levels of police brutality in Senegal.
Do you have an explanation?
Is it due to socioeconomic factors?
And you say, okay, like she's totally reasonable that she wouldn't be prepared.
And she would say, look, I know that's an important issue, but I'm not really, I want to be briefed more before I'm ready to speak on that.
I just don't have enough knowledge.
This is like one of those central foreign policy questions for decades.
How do you not know about the issue of Taiwan and the U.S.-Chinese relationship and what U.S. foreign policy should be when you're going and you've announced to the entire world media, here's my coming out.
I'm being a foreign policy expert, somebody who has my own worldview that's going to oppose Trump's worldview where I'm going to be taken seriously.
And you get asked about Taiwan and this is what you do.
And then you start saying, like, the first thing that you finally get out of your mouth is, oh, this is a long-standing policy.
Like, what does that even mean?
You haven't talked about a policy yet.
Policy of the United States.
And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.
Yes, everybody would like to make sure we never get to the point where China attacks Taiwan and we're faced with the choice of whether we intervene militarily.
We all know that.
The question was, what will you do?
What should the United States do in the event that China does attack Taiwan militarily?
We want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.
I'm sorry, that is a, she's a joke, at least when it comes still to foreign policy.
I'll leave everything else aside since we're focused on that.
And it is a recent debate as well.
Like I said, under the Biden administration, there were some extremely hawkish and provocative statements Joe Biden made about Taiwan.
Nancy Pelosi elevated that as a major issue to the House caucus.
She could just say, which she sort of did inadvertently, I think it's best to, I believe in strategic ambiguity that the United States has always offered.
So I don't think we ought to say in advance what we're going to do to leave that ambiguity as the explicit answer that we give while we work with.
I mean, there were many, many things she could have said, but she had no idea what she was supposed to say on any of this.
And so she basically ended up saying nothing other than, I think we ought to do everything possible to avoid that.
Yes, yes, everybody agrees with that, AOC.
If you avoid it, it will never become an issue.
But the issue is we've actually moved closer to Chinese aggression in its region, to the belief that China has that they can take Taiwan with the United States militarily distracted in so many other places.
You have to, if you announce to the global media that you're going to make your foreign policy debut as a serious thinker, as somebody who can be taken seriously as an astronomer, this is an absolute horror show, a disaster.
And the fact is, she's just not a serious person.
She has political talent.
On domestic issues, she sort of has this ability to speak in a way that make people think hiring or whatever, even though she isn't.
That's a political scare.
Combined with the fact that she's petrified of ever saying anything that is at all considered radical, she has that, she's ingesting that kind of Kamala fear of never going off script, never saying anything that Matt Dust will yell at her for saying, combined with that extreme caution and her utter lack of knowledge, just like her native intrinsic knowledge, she's barely conversant in foreign policy issues, which is fine.
You can be a House speaker for a long, you could be a member of the House for a long time and have no idea about foreign policy.
But if you want to, as she obviously does, ascend to positions of greater national significance, this is a joke.