AOC’s Risible Performance

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did a star turn at the Munich Security Conference, and her appearances went about as well as you’d expect of a celebrity congresswoman who has spent five minutes thinking about foreign policy.

 

AOC is to strategic thinkers what Gayle King is to astronauts.

 

She projects all the authority of an International Relations 101 student who didn’t realize that there was going to be a pop quiz before spring break.

 

She sounds as if she watched the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign and concluded that what sank the vice president was that the candidate’s policy answers were much too substantive and precise. There’s no way, judging by her performance in Germany, that AOC is going to let herself make the same mistake.

 

Ocasio-Cortez critiqued Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarkable speech at the conference for being “a pure appeal to ‘Western culture,’” which she rendered with air quotes as though its existence is somehow in doubt.

 

It is certainly true, as she said, that cultures change over time, but this doesn’t alter the reality of Western distinctiveness as it has developed over a couple of millennia.

 

AOC seemed to consider it a provocation that Rubio had talked about Western culture when discussing a Western alliance, NATO, founded to defend Western countries from a totalitarian menace emanating from a Eurasian behemoth.

 

In fact, the secretary’s speech was well-received and persuasively set out the common history of Europe and the United States.

 

The AOC rejoinder was that what she called “alleged” Western values are illusory because they haven’t always defined our interactions with “the global South.” Even if the West hasn’t always lived up to its values, though, that doesn’t falsify them or make them any less powerful.

 

The best formula for success for underdeveloped countries around the world — the global South — would be for them to Westernize in the sense of embracing the rule of law, property rights, markets, and stable, representative government.

 

AOC also said that culture is “thin” compared to concrete economic interests. This belief that material considerations trump cultural ones — from religious faith to national identity — is an old Marxist chestnut that has proved false over and over again.

 

At the outset of World War I, the AOCs of the time believed that the working classes of the various combatant countries would unite to oppose the conflict. As it happened, they backed the war efforts of their own nations.

 

The average American worker has nothing in common with a Chinese worker or, for that matter, a French or German worker. AOC is hoping for, in effect, a Fourth International as the foundation of “class-based” U.S. foreign policy — democratic socialists of the world unite!

 

This is a childish fantasy, but it wasn’t the least impressive thing she said at Munich.

 

Asked whether the U.S. should defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, AOC hesitated and stumbled as though the question had never occurred to her previously, before not answering.

 

She objected to our operation to grab Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. According to AOC, we undertook it “just because the nation is below the equator,” when Venezuela is north of the equator.

 

She poured scorn on Marco Rubio’s statement that American cowboy culture was “born in Spain,” apparently not realizing that he was wholly correct about this.

 

AOC is young and charismatic with a long career ahead of her, and she isn’t seeking to land a job at the State Department — she doesn’t need to be Prince Metternich or even Antony Blinken.

 

Yet, her time at the Munich conference was another reminder that no matter how much she is billed as a rising star, she is still callow and unserious. If AOC knows what she doesn’t know, she doesn’t seem to particularly care, and her casual disregard for Western culture is symptomatic of a left that, to its shame, considers its own civilization an affront and a lie.