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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued a dire warning about President Donald Trump’s apparent ambition to destroy the rules-based international order and let authoritarians “make the world” as long as he keeps the Western Hemisphere.
The New York Democrat made her case Friday during a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference, beginning with a call to protect 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 that exist when, too often in the West, we look the other way to inconvenient populations to represent these paradoxes,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
He 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 genocide, hypocrisies are vulnerabilities and threaten democracies globally.”
However, Ocasio-Cortez delivered her most direct comments when New York Times moderating journalist Katrin Bennhold asked what 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 US must first review its foreign aid commitments through agencies like USAID, and renew US political agreements with several allies that the Trump administration has abandoned.
“They are seeking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can become an era of authoritarianism, of authoritarians, that can forge a world where Donald Trump can dominate the Western Hemisphere and Latin America,” he continued.
Ocasio-Cortez added that Trump sees the entire Western Hemisphere as “his personal testing environment.”
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Furthermore, he argued that Trump wouldn’t care if heavy-handed leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin began “making noise in Europe” and militarily “intimidating” America’s allies there, reiterating that his goal is for “authoritarians to have their own geographic domains.”
Trump has admitted that there is only “one thing” that limits his pursuit of 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.”
On Friday, Ocasio-Cortez finished making her case by returning to the moderator’s central question about what institutions or policies a Democratic administration might want to save, sparking new speculation about her possible presidential bid in 2028.
He told Bennhold: “And it’s actually the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it’s our global alliances that can be a difficult brake against authoritarian consolidation of power, particularly in the installation of regional puppet governments.”