Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s effort to bolster her foreign policy credentials on the international stage backfired, with criticism coming from both sides of the aisle.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, spoke on two panels while at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, one about the rise of populism and another about the “seismic shifts in U.S. foreign policy.”
While she slammed the Trump administration, accusing the president of authoritarianism that puts the world at risk, her comments on foreign policy were mocked and criticized.
President Trump told reporters Monday that he watched her panel performances and that it “was not a good look for the United States.”
Political analyst Mark Halperin said on his “2WAY Tonight” podcast that “giving AOC a slot may go down in history as one of the bigger mistakes she’s ever made if she wants to be president.”
He referenced a New York Times article that said Ms. Ocasio-Cortez brought a “working-class vision in Munich, with some stumbles.”
“It takes a major screwup for The New York Times to put in their story about AOC that she had, I think they said it was a ‘stumble’ or something,” he said. “It had to be a really bad stumble.”
When asked at the conference about whether the U.S. should send troops to defend Taiwan against China, she couldn’t get an answer out.
“Um, you know, I think that, uh, this is such, uh, you know I think that this a, um, this is of course, a, uh, a very long standing, um, policy of the United States,” she said.
One of her biggest fumbles was referring to Venezuela as “below the equator” when hitting the Trump administration for arresting President Nicolas Maduro. The South American country is just above the equator.
“It is not a remark on who Maduro was as a leader. He canceled elections. He was an anti-democratic leader. That doesn’t mean that we can kidnap a head of state and engage in acts of war just because the nation is below the equator,” she said.
The Washington Post editorial board also called her performance a “stumble.”
“The usually poised politician often appeared out of her depth as she tried to graft her class-warfare politics onto foreign policy,” the Post wrote.
“The message to her European audience was, in short: The West is very bad, but the U.S. and Europe should remain allies anyway. She said that the U.S. had enabled genocide in Gaza and that President Donald Trump was treating Latin America as America’s sandbox. She used conspiratorial language about corporations and oligarchs controlling governments and dictating global affairs to the detriment of the poor people around the world. It led her to sound more like a university faculty member than someone conducting foreign policy,” the newspaper wrote.
The Washington Times has reached out to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s office for comment.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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