Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered a dire warning about President Donald Trump’s apparent ambition to destroy the international rules-based order and let authoritarians “carve out the world” — as long as he gets the Western Hemisphere.
The New York Democrat made her case Friday during a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference, beginning with a call for protecting the world’s democracies amid Trump’s controversial foreign and domestic policy actions that define this volatile “new era.”
“I think what we are seeking is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates the hypocrisies around when, too often in the West, we look the other way for inconvenient populations to act out these paradoxes,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
She continued with examples: “Whether it is kidnapping a foreign head of state, whether it is threatening our allies to colonize Greenland, whether it is looking the other way in a genocide, hypocrisies are vulnerabilities and they threaten democracies globally.”
Ocasio-Cortez delivered her most pointed remarks, however, when moderating New York Times journalist Katrin Bennhold asked which policies or institutions — such as NATO, the Paris Climate Accords or the Iran nuclear deal — a Democratic administration would save.
The progressive congresswoman began by arguing that the U.S. must first revisit its commitments to foreign assistance through agencies such as USAID, and renew America’s political agreements with various allies that the Trump administration has abandoned.
“They are looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarianism, of authoritarians, that can carve out the world where Donald Trump can command the Western Hemisphere and Latin America,” she continued.
Ocasio-Cortez added that Trump sees the entire Western Hemisphere as “his personal sandbox.”
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She further argued Trump wouldn’t care if strong-arm leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin started to “saber-rattle around Europe” and militarily “bully” America’s allies there, reiterating that his goal is for “authoritarians to have their own geographic domains.”
Trump has admitted there is only “one thing” limiting his quest for land and resources, telling the New York Times, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“I don’t need international law,” he continued at the time. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
Ocasio-Cortez on Friday finished making her case by returning to the moderator’s central question about which institutions or policies a Democratic administration might want to save, sparking renewed speculation of her potential presidential run in 2028.
She told Bennhold, “And it actually is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it is our global alliances that can be a hard stop against authoritarian consolidation of power, particularly in the installation of regional puppet governments.”
