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.
