AOC’s Breakout Performance

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 16, 2026

 

Did you see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? She really stuck it to Marco Rubio over the weekend. Everyone’s talking about the speech Trump’s henchman delivered at the Munich Security Conference — or, they were before AOC blew him and his Cuban-inflected version of Eurocentric “whiteness” out of the water.

 

“Marco Rubio’s speech was a pure appeal to ‘Western culture,’” she sneered from the stage at the University of Berlin, deploying deservedly exaggerated air quotes. She added that her “favorite part” of the speech was “when he said that American cowboys came from Spain,” at which point she and everyone else in the audience laughed at Rubio’s ignorance. “The Mexicans and descendants of African enslaved peoples would like to have a word on that,” she continued.

 

Okay. So, ChatGPT says the Spanish introduced horses to the North American continent, and Gaucho culture is a late 18th-century import to the Americas. Regardless, Ocasio-Cortez’s confidence put Trump’s smug diplomat in his place.

 

“We can’t underestimate the appeal of going back to these well-worn grooves,” Ocasio-Cortez warned of Rubio’s “thin” appeal to shared cultural affinities across the Western world. “A lot of what we talk about when we talk about a class-based internationalist perspective also means ending the hypocrisy toward the global south.”

 

Like what? Well, like the unilateral U.S. operation that resulted in Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s capture. Sure, AOC conceded, Maduro was “anti-democratic.” But 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.” If you ignore the fact that Maduro’s capture was pursuant to a U.S. arrest warrant, and Venezuela is situated entirely north of the Equator, the representative’s logic is unassailable.

 

Sure, much of the “global south” sloughed off the “class-based internationalist perspective” imposed on them by the Soviets the second they had the opportunity, after which about 1 billion people emerged from extreme, transgenerational poverty. Nevertheless, AOC’s remarks were in keeping with her contention that market-based free trade is basically protectionism for big corporations. That must mean that protectionism isn’t really protectionism, and we can safely assume that protectionism — whatever it is — is bad.

 

Ocasio-Cortez had some less impressive moments during her swing through Germany. But even if you didn’t understand precisely what she was saying, you could feel that her heart was in the right place.

 

“I think what we identify is that in a rules-based order, hypocrisy is vulnerability,” the representative said, scratching out something like a doctrinal approach to foreign policy. “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.”

 

She might have phrased that more clearly, but you know what she’s saying. In short, nations that pursue their interests irrespective of their values invite the charge of hypocrisy, and paradoxes surrounding inconvenient peoples invariably follow. It makes sense if you don’t think about it.

 

The whole world seems to be coming down around AOC’s shoulders over her response to the very simple question of whether the United States should come to Taiwan’s defense if it is attacked by communist China. And yes, Ocasio-Cortez stumbled around a little bit, but she eventually got around to a salient thought. It’s important for us to follow her journey.

 

“Um, you know, I think that this is such a — a — you know, I think that this is a, um, this is of course a very longstanding, um, policy of the United States,” she began. “And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point, and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.”

 

What’s so hard to understand about that? Of course, America hopes to deter Chinese aggression, and we will do that by “moving in all of our economic research and global positions.” Maybe she didn’t exactly answer the question, which was premised on a failure of deterrence, but she answered the question she wanted to answer. Whip smart.

 

Perhaps her answers were a little garbled at times, a bit too high-flown and academic at others. But she was inspiring. “We are all drops that when put together make an ocean, but we don’t see the ocean at the start,” she said. AOC warned against corporate power and giving corporatists license to tell themselves, “Let’s have a big oligarchy party!” You know that they would just love to have that oligarchy party, those corporatists. “We have to learn how to hold conflict and hold together in conflict,” the great communicator closed. Ain’t it the truth.

 

Obviously, the ideas AOC promulgated in Germany are beyond reproach. Only the keenest minds would be attracted to them, much less capable of articulating them. So, she stumbled here and there. So what? The philosophy to which a mind as sharp as AOC’s is attracted must have some real intellectual heft to it. With champions like her, how can those ideas lose?