AOC's DISASTROUS Foreign Policy Debut In Munich

So in addition to Marco Rubio, there were some noteworthy comments in Munich from 2028 Democratic contenders. The one who got the most attention probably was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a bit of what she had to say.

First and foremost, I think we need to revisit our commitments to international aid, not just USAID, but the dozens of global compacts that the current Secretary of State and President Trump have withdrawn from, they are looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarians that can carve out the world where Donald Trump can command the Western Hemisphere and Latin America as his personal sandbox,

where Putin can saber rattle around Europe and try to bully around our own allies there and for essentially authoritarians to have their own geographic domains. 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. In a so-called rules-based order the rules for whom because for all too long the rules only applied to the United States Europe its allies and

we would carve out exceptions for the global South and

I

Think that when you have a rules-based order, where you carve out exceptions to our values, exceptions to our rules, eventually the exceptions become the rules. And I think that to your original point, over the last five years, we've seen such a breaking and such a fraying

of these alleged Western values that people wonder if it ever existed in the first place. So I don't know if it's necessarily that we were in a post, if we are in a post rules-based order. I think it's possible that we were

in a pre-rules-based order. And we have an opportunity to explore what a world would look like if we upheld democracy, human rights, trade that actually centers working class people instead of accruing overwhelmingly the benefits of trade to the wealthiest.

But if we reoriented a new era that could actually help people and show how foreign policy and healthy foreign policy can show up

and help them in their lives. So there's a lot to unpack there. I mean, first of all, on the content, you know, what she lays out there is basically, what she says, trans-Pacific partnership, which of course, the old trade deals,

she clarified on Twitter, she meant to say trans-Atlantic alliances. But what she's describing there is effectively like a neocon approach.

That is the neocon worldview.

We need to spread democracy around the world, and we're going to use our strength and our partnerships in this alliance to make sure that we're standing up to authoritarians all over the world. And so I don't agree with that foreign policy direction. I'm largely ideologically aligned with AOC on many domestic policy issues, but this is straight out of like standard Democratic Party establishment blob playbook.

So there's that, there's the substance of it that I object to. And then I watched her entire commentary here. I watched all the panels she did, et cetera. And I will just say on a presentation, from a presentation perspective, she's so clearly very uncomfortable. And you know what happened here. Her staff is like,

if you wanna be in position to run for president, you need to do this, you need to build out like your foreign policy chops, so we're gonna send you to this conference. And it did not go well. It has the feel to me of someone who, you know, hasn't fully fleshed out their own worldview.

So they've received briefings. They've got, you know, a binder of prep materials, and they're trying to memorize the notes of what that said versus being nimble enough in their ideology to respond to the questions that are being asked. And that's how you make a slip up.

Like, I don't want to read too much into it, but that's how you make up a slip up, make a slip up, like saying trans-Pacific partnership rather than trans-Atlantic alliance, because rather than articulating your worldview, you're trying to remember what you memorized. So she was very shaky. She was totally out of her element and very uncomfortable up there the whole time. Well, I'll give you, the TPP line wouldn't matter

if it wasn't clearly indicative of a bigger problem. So let me read this exchange on Taiwan. Question about the United States should send troops to defend Taiwan. AOC roughly stalled for 20 seconds before delivering this response.

I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, this is of course, very longstanding policy of the United States. What are we doing here? It's like, I don't wanna say yes, I don't wanna say no.

Now listen, Donald Trump also got elected by being a bumbling moron, all right? So like on foreign policy. So let's say where the bar is. This was my greatest fear about Trump is that he would make popular, again, the diminishing, look, there was, I think,

a real reckoning after Biden and a lot of the support for Ukraine where people saw that the wool had been pulled from in front of their eyes. Because at first everyone was like, oh, I'll pay more gas to free Ukraine. And after two years, you're like,

well, we're a hundred billion into this thing. My gas prices are high, the eastern Donbass isn't all that important to me, should we really be the world's policemen, well what are the circumstances which led to the invasion of Ukraine, do we really have an interest in spreading democracy around the world, what's our track record on spreading democracy around the world? Trump being so ham-handed, in my opinion, has actually made this type of politics more

popular than ever before, purely by being oppositional. But what true leftists have always understood is that there is an actual critique of NATO and all of this, which in some cases is aligned with Trump. Now, that doesn't mean you buy into it wholesale. You have much more of an internationalist,

humanitarian vision. See many of our debates on Gaza now, for example. Where can be differences, but that doesn't mean that the critique specifically around restraint and the acknowledgement of US power being overextended, bad for them, bad for us, bad for everybody involved. She has clearly just not thought about it very much.

And this is the biggest danger for foreign policy. And I've seen this time and time again. You know, George W. Bush, for example, he was a lot like this. And I mean, this sounds crazy to say. He was the Texas governor, which is a fake job. And I'm telling you that as someone who was born from Texas. The Texas governor literally doesn't do anything.

He did nothing. His entire foreign policy worldview was colored in by his father. He ran on being a restrainer, actually in the year 2000. You can go and read, we're not gonna be the world's policemen, et cetera.

9-11 happens, what happened? The entire apparatus which was in his chain are the people who took over and he became convinced to be a neocon. This is the problem for AOC. She just clearly, this is your brain on New York Times. Like that's how I would describe it. She has not thought very deeply around the foreign policy question.

Let's compare her to a Ro Khanna. I mean, good Lord, it's a polar opposite. I mean, I really, he probably is the only one who has a defined vision, which was updated, also, I think, from Gaza. He said, okay, very clearly, we have to see this. He's pro-Ukraine, which I have my own issues with,

but he's somebody who has thought about these questions, has thought independently, has read a lot. I don't think he would confuse TPP. I think on the Taiwan question, he would probably be able to give a decent enough answer where it's like, well, we're gonna make sure that that doesn't happen.

We have to balance great power competition and all of that with China. It's not just about command of the facts. It's about what's your actual worldview. To me, this seems very colored in by the Democratic Party establishment.

And this is a big danger for everybody because if anything is the truth, what we have learned over the years is that when you vote for president in our current imperial system, you are gonna get maybe 2% domestically of what you want, but 100% is in the control of the president for foreign policy. It's probably the most important question

that we have to answer. And look, I mean, it's been a miserable failure here under Donald Trump, even though I thought there were a lot of promising signs. People who had spoke very much more articulately than AOC, let's say, at Munich, ended up not having all that much influence or being co-opted.

So I'm not saying that even just speaking coherently will lead to necessarily good things, but we should really think deeply about this question if we're going to, when we elect a new president.

I absolutely agree. And I kind of reject, I mean, I was gonna say, I don't know how much it matters electorally, but I kind of reject this view that Americans don't really vote on foreign policy. I don't think that's true. I mean, we saw numerous elections that turned on the question of,

where were you on the Iraq War? Trump, I think, benefited very much from at least positioning himself as an Iraq War critic, whether he was one from the jump or not is another matter. And you know, in the previous election, the choice between Trump and Kamala Harris, we in our own focus group talked to people who I was personally, as someone who thought that Gaza mattered a lot, I was personally surprised by how many people cited war and

Gaza specifically as a reason why they voted for Trump or didn't vote at all. And, you know, you can say they were foolish. I, you know, I certainly think there were plenty of reasons to believe that it would not go well with him as president, but they were looking at what was being done under a Biden-Harris administration. We're like, we do not support this.

So it is also an area where, look, we've never had a woman president. We've certainly, we've never had a Latino president, you have to ask people to imagine you in that role. And part of that is being able to, you know, handle yourself in these settings, come across as very confident in your assertions. If she was on this panel with, who is this guy?

He's like the ambassador. I mean, he's not an impressive person, but he's like very confident. You know, he's up there saying his thing, touting Trump's quote unquote accomplishments, blah, blah, blah. And to see her diminished next to that guy, I don't know, it was very disappointing to me.

It also reminded me of when she first got elected, she got asked a question about Israel-Palestine, remember? And the answer was kind of a mess. And she clearly knew, okay, there's some things I'm not supposed to say,

but I don't know what those things are. And it was very forgivable at the moment, because here she's been an organizer and a bartender and she runs for Congress, and this isn't something that she's really steeped in. So I think, okay, I get it. You are coming in there as a representative of the people. This isn't an area that you've studied and explored, and you now have the opportunity to as a member of Congress. But not only with her presentation, but also with the way she's continued to be

really twisted into knots over what she wants to say and how she wants to vote on Israel and Palestine. It's emblematic of the fact that some of that work has been done to really come to a fully fleshed out foreign policy worldview, but there's still a lot of work to be done.

And that, to me, really came across in this presentation.

Also, it was seven years ago. You can forgive, this is your job. You have nothing else to do. This is literally your job. You want to run for president, and this is what you're doing?

Let me return to the Trump thing. Because I was just thinking about it. All true. Guess what though? Deep inside of that was the same theory. America's getting ripped off and the previous elite sucks. So no matter what the second grade reading level of all of that was, the message was coherent. The message on this was not coherent.

The man is not lacking in confidence. And for better or worse, someone who gets up there and is bumbling and saying terrible things, but they say it with their full chest and totally confident. With the whole ego behind them, it's appealing to people.

Because if you have that quiver in your voice, like I'm not really sure what I'm saying, it signals weakness. I mean, that's just the way that people read it. So even though what he said, if you read it out in a transcript, may have been bumbling second grade reading level, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, the communication skills are effective

and he is nothing if not confident. So, you know, I think, look, it's something she's gonna have to really, it's something she's gonna have to really work on and we'll see where it goes. I mean, all that being said, take a look at this D2,

her polling is extraordinarily high among young Democrats. I mean, they freaking love AOC. 81% net approval rating, favorability rating among young Democrats. There is no one who comes close to that. The second position here is Pete Buttigieg down at plus 45%. Then you've got Gavin plus 42%, Kamala 38%, Gretchen Whitmer, who we're about to talk about, 34. So she is the Democratic Party star for young Democrats. So she has a lot that she can work with.

She's certainly got a fundraising base. On domestic issues, she's very confident and I think in step with where the base of the party is very much. But this definitely exposed an area of significant, significant weakness for her.

And you can just imagine her up on a debate stage with another one who may be wrong but confident, Gavin Newsom, you know, is certainly going to be, you could see it going poorly for her in that sort of setting under that sort of scrutiny and with that level of pressure.

Yeah, I don't know. Look, the polling, it is interesting. I'll be honest, I don't really understand it because to me, she has not been the leader in this. I mean, you tell me. I'm not a leftist, I'm not as embroiled in left politics.

Outside of Zoran, which wasn't she a little bit late to, there were a lot of people who were much earlier. Like outside of that, I haven't seen her been a national leader in any of this. Ro Khanna is everything AOC pretends, like in my opinion. Like he led on the Epstein question, he led on Gaza. Like she was not a leader on Gaza. She gave some weird ass answer about defensive weapons.

Even on ICE, like yeah, she, you know. You could say she was an ICE, anti-ICE, abolished ICE person in 2018, not today. I don't think so. I mean, what? Chris Van Hollen's more of a warrior than her. Like, I'm just being real. Like, if you look at issue by issue by issue,

is it all vibe-based? Because if it is, you need to update your priors. Like, if you just, and again, I'm looking at and if I'm a base, right?

I think the reason that she is so well thought of, especially among young Democrats, is because the Bernie wing of the party is ascendant, right? And she is the person who is most associated. She is like the person who is not Bernie, who is most associated with those politics.

And she did the fighting oligarchy tour at the beginning of the Trump administration. I think that was very beneficial to her. She's very good on her social media presence, et cetera. But it is more about a branding than it is a reality.

Because I agree with you.

I agree with you.

Look at the ballot sheet. She's not been a leader on any of the major issues, none.

And I feel like, I mean, I do think that Rowe, who of course I like and we love that he comes on the show and all of those sorts of things, but he really stuck his neck out on, I mean, on Gaza, he's getting all kinds of incoming from AIPAC and whoever. He on Epstein has been, he was very prescient there.

Also billionaires. In California?

And then going up against- Who would the hate this guy's taking? And not just in California. He represents Silicon Valley. I know. That's what I'm saying. Like, they're all, that is his, those are his constituents. And he's been very courageous there and understood the moment of where the country, I mean, I just, coming back to the Epstein thing, not just on a, this is the right, morally righteous

thing to do. this has been the most effective attack on Trump. I mean, this has been more damaging to him than much of anything else I can think of outside of his own terrible economic policies. But in terms of actually creating friction in the MAGA base and separating the podcast bros from the Trump administration,

nothing has been more successful. So he has had a very successful instinct there, and I do, I don't feel like AOC has been sort of leading the charge on any of these key issues in this moment.

And she's not confident. She won't even come on this show. I'm not gonna see her on Flagrant anytime soon. I'm not seeing her on Sean Ryan anytime soon. I mean, Ro Khanna got Sean Ryan, who's one of the biggest podcasters in the country,

to basically agree with him on the Epstein question. You turn to this person, Sean Ryan's out there tweeting about how great, look, maybe I'm reading too much into it. Again, maybe, you know, I'm too online, hand up.

It's very possible. I just don't get the oval.

I just don't get the oval.

There's two different media strategies here.

Right, you know, like.

It's two different media strategies. I'm gonna go Sean Ryan, whoever invites me basically, I will go. He just was on with the I've had it ladies. AOC's media strategy is I'm going to build my own media apparatus on my terms, right? My Instagram lives, I'm gonna be on Twitter, I'm gonna like my social media presence is going to be my media strategy.

So two different media strategies, we'll see which one ultimately pans out. Another person who was there, let's actually skip ahead to Gavin Newsom because I think he's more noteworthy than Gretchen Whitmer. One thing that is interesting is you probably didn't, maybe didn't even know Gavin Newsom was there because AOC did steal the spotlight. Now it wasn't necessarily in a positive way because there was a lot of criticism of her comments. The right of course, picked up on all the stumbles and the bumbles in her looking not fully prepared for this. But there were plenty of lefties who, like myself,

were critical of the content of her comments with regard to, hey, we're going to go out and be the policemen of the world. Let's go and take a listen, though, to a little bit of Newsom's presentation and what he wanted to convey there in Munich. What are you doing to fight the US federal government's reversal on climate policies? I'm showing up.

Look, it's... Donald Trump is doubling down on stupid. California has been a leader in climate policy going back to Ronald Reagan. 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan established the first tailpipe of missions in the United States of America, created the California Air Resources Board. Three years later, President by the name of Richard Nixon, another Republican, codified

California's leadership under the Clean Air Act. Never in the history of the United States of America has there been a more destructive president than the current occupant in the White House in Washington, D.C.? He's trying to recreate the 19th century. He's a wholly owned subsidiary of big oil, gas, and coal. He's quite literally reopening coal plants in the United States of America.

He's received close to half a billion dollars in campaign contributions. He asked for one billion, look it up, in return for basically eliminating all regulations in the United States of America. De facto he just did that yesterday with federal regulations and the endangerment finding. It is code red in terms of American leadership in this space. Low carbon, green growth. And I know a thing or two about this. I represent the fourth largest economy

from a GDP perspective in the world.

So Newsom, obviously a presentation, he's very confident and he managed to position himself over Axie as a fiercer critic of Trump and Trump's foreign policy and his approach to global affairs. You know, again, I watch all of AOC's presentation. It has the vibe to me of wanting to sound like you're smart

rather than just wanting to communicate directly. And so putting a lot of sort of like fluff and flowery words around it, which makes it just sound more incoherent and less assertive.

Yeah, with Newsom, what you saw there is a masterclass. He didn't say anything, literally anything about the way that the world should work. By the way, you know, get to the whole details. He and AOC are like this. They basically believe in the exact same thing. He's talking there about some DSG, WAF vision.

Oh, sorry, ESG. Okay. I mean, there's nothing all that different about that than standard issue Hillary Clinton liberalism, which will lead us right back into Benghazi, Iraq, and all the other nonsense. But that's the problem, is that on a presentation level,

he accomplished what she couldn't, is that, by the way, not only does that, I think he actually believes that, like from a foreign policy vision, he communicated it much more effectively and confidently. And so this is going to be, I think, very important

for what the future party hashing out and all of that will look like. I don't know how much foreign policy will play a role in this particular primary election. Obviously, we have no idea what the future and all of that will hold.

I think it'll primarily be domestic policy focused. So I'm not saying she can't win if that's gonna be her strong suit, but I don't know, I do hope that the voters actually do take a look at who's actually doing what. If you do care about standing up to Trump and all that. I do not see, I see him as more effective than her.

Newsome.

Yes, absolutely. Not only from a rhetorical level, look, he's a lowly congressman, you can't do everything, but Ro Khanna's a lowly congressman, he's doing something. Thomas Massey is a lowly congressman, he did something. Senator Chris Van Hollen is from, what, Maryland? Like, it's a tiny little state, they have no power.

He basically was the leader on Kilmar-Obrego-Garcin. Like, there's all kinds of people who are becoming political entrepreneurs who I, I mean what, Chris Murphy's from Connecticut, like nobody cares, right? It's a tiny little state. He actually was able to raise his national profile, so I don't think it's an excuse either.

Murphy was there as well. Murphy's an interesting one. He's one we've been trying to get on the show because he seems to have understood the populist moment. Now he's like positioned himself with a lot of like populist rhetoric. And he actually had a moment, I'm not gonna play it here because I don't know that it's like that extraordinary,

but talking about how, listen, it's a fake ceasefire in Gaza, like people are still getting killed. And again, it was, you know, I mean, it was a good moment for him. It was clippable.

I think it resonated with the Democratic base. And you're gonna have a lot of people He probably wants to run. Newsom's obviously gonna run. There's a piece out today about how Pelosi's mission in life now is to get Gavin Newsom elected president. But in any case, you're gonna have a lot of people who have at least enough sense to see where the Democratic base is.

And even if they're just normal status quo politicians, try to position themselves in that vein. And that's what Gavin is doing with his resistance to Trump politics, even as he's fighting against this wealth tax in California. So you know exactly what side he's going to be on at the end of the day.

Chris Murphy, I'm sort of intrigued by. I want to know if he really means the things that he says. And it's very hard to say at this point, because he's always been just a, you know, also a standard issue Democratic politician on domestic policy and on foreign policy. So you're gonna have a lot of people who are trying to pull off the Jasmine Crockett of like, I'm gonna sound like I'm a fighter,

but at the end of the day, I'm just basically in line with Nancy Pelosi.

I interviewed Murphy at this conference.

Oh yeah, what'd you think?

This is against our own interests because we've been trying I found him, he's a very calculating guy. So he did this thing where I asked him about, what does a future coalition, you're gonna have to make up, you're gonna have to compromise on some of your values. If you wanna win, that's how the Republicans won.

That's how, if you wanna win, if you wanna win the popular vote. So what do you do? And he was like, well, I've learned that we may have to compromise, but he didn't say anything except on guns. He's like, well, guns was a very important. I'm like, dude, guns is not a major cleavage issue today.

That seemed like a very selected one where, oh, maybe I'd be willing to work with somebody who disagreed with me on guns. I mean, I didn't have enough time to follow up on abortion or any of these other real litmus test questions, but that kind of showed me that like, he's trying to read the room, he's trying to pick the most, you know,

non, the most non-controversial issue where he can claim like he's compromising. Whenever I would have asked him directly on tariffs, he was just like, tariffs are a tool, but he had no coherent like vision. Even on antitrust, everything was kind of like

spit out from a white paper. Now, don't get me wrong, he's a smart guy, all right? Like, he's actually smart, well-read, much more. Read the room much better than even Gavin in a lot of ways. He read the room, he reads the news, he listens to the podcasts and all that, but everything just seems a little bit like three to six months out of date. Maybe that's, you know, a very unkind way of saying it,

but then, like I said, I mean, is on our show like months before any of this becomes a thing, and then that's political entrepreneurship. That's vision, right? That vision is Trump saying build the wall. Like vision is kind of picking up on Epstein way before it becomes a thing.

I'm like, whoa, I gotta do something about it. Right, exactly.

Like that's, entrepreneurship is picking something long before it becomes mainstream and then kind of picking it up and turning it into your own thing. And those are all the people I'm gonna respect at a political level.

Those are the founders as well, like the true, the founders of new movements. Like if we think about Reagan, Reagan was way out of his time whenever it come to not only entertainment aspect of politics,

but also like going all in on his economic vision. I disagree with it, but he went all in in 76, long before he wins 1980. Let's think about other.

I mean, Bernie, you could say this.

Bernie was a political entrepreneur. I mean, God, this guy was on Lou Dobbs' show railing against oligarchs and Fox Business in 2008, 2009. Like Obama, 2002, it took balls to give the speech against the Iraq War. There was nothing in it for him.

That's the reason he ends up president. So you gotta put yourself out there and actually do something risky. I haven't seen any of these guys do that.

You have to move not to where things are today, but where you anticipate they're going. And in any case, And in any case, you know, interesting display of the 2020 contenders.