Sorry, But AOC Got the Taiwan Question Right.
It's everything else she said at the Munich Security Conference and since that you should be bothered by.
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being raked over the coals for a number of foreign policy gaffes she made at the Munich Security Conference this weekend—then calling a sympathetic reporter at the New York Times to reframe the narrative on Monday. Ocasio-Cortez mistakenly said that Venezuela is below the equator. She refused to call its erstwhile dictator, Nicolas Maduro, a dictator. Most widely mocked was a viral clip in which AOC stammered for 20 seconds before answering a question about whether she believed the U.S. should send troops to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion.
The trip is being heralded as a disaster. But to me, the criticism is entirely focused on the wrong thing.
I truly don't understand people acting like her answer on Taiwan was somehow unacceptable. Whether the U.S. should commit troops to defend Taiwan is quite literally the hardest foreign policy question of the moment, for the simple reason that there is no right answer.
“Yes, America should commit troops to defend Taiwan” is wrong: Americans are done sending our boys and girls to die in foreign wars. And are we really saying we are prepared to get into a hot war with China? It’s unthinkable.
But “No, America should not commit troops to defend Taiwan” is wrong, too. Taiwan is an ally, and China our greatest adversary. It’s equally unthinkable to abandon Taiwan should it God forbid come to that. And it would be economic suicide to allow China to control the country that produces 90% of semiconductors. Even with the President’s tariffs and laudable attempts to reshore manufacturing, we rely on Taiwan way too much to allow our greatest adversary to control its trade.
What AOC ended up saying is actually the only correct answer: We should try to do everything we can to prevent the choice of whether or not to send troops to defend Taiwan from being forced.
Here’s how AOC put it: “This is, of course, a, a very long-standing, policy of the United States, 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.”
Indeed: This is not only the current status quo of the United States, but it’s basically how President Trump has answered this question repeatedly—when he isn’t saying “I never comment on that” or “I would certainly never tell you.”
Many made fun of the fact that that AOC stuttered for 20 seconds before answering. So you would have preferred a smooth, pre-rehearsed answer over evidence that she was thinking through what she wanted to say in the moment? Others pointed out that President Obama wouldn’t have answered the question either, but he would have sounded smart deflecting for 10 minutes. That’s true—and it’s bad! Being able to fool people into thinking you’re being honest with highfalutin erudition is not actually a great leadership quality.
Others took issue with the fact that AOC didn’t use the phrase “strategic ambiguity” when describing the U.S.’s position on Taiwan. I’m sorry, but I am just allergic to this kind of snobbery. Dare I suggest that obsessing over someone’s failure to use a pre-planned specific piece of jargon to describe a specific position is why we have such old and over-credentialed politicians? Even if you get the sentiment right, you didn’t use the right words!
Beyond that, it’s insane to me to be nitpicking over linguistic niceties in the age of Trump, a man who realized extremely early on in his political career that voters don’t give a hoot if you use the correct terminology for things if you have their best interests at heart.
That’s kind of the whole point of populism—the experts talk a good game but they sell you out while pretending to care about your interests. (See: Obama.)
Trump’s whole appeal is that he talks like an everyman, that he sticks his finger in the eye of the elites who insist you say “strategic ambiguity” and not “we want to make sure that we never get to that point.”
So it’s kind of sad to me that instead of saying, “Screw you, nerds,” AOC called a friendly reporter at the New York Times to complain about the coverage and get her side of the story out.
So what’s her side?
AOC was “frustrated” at the attention paid to her comments and to whether her presence in Munich signaled a 2028 run for president, when according to AOC, she had gone to Munich “not because I’m running for president, not because I’ve made some kind of decision about a horse race or a candidacy, but because we need to sound the alarm bells that a lot of those folks in nicely pressed suits in that room will not be there much longer if we do not do something about the runaway inequality that is fueling far-right populist movements.” She told the NYT that efforts to make clips of “any five-to-10-second thing” go viral was done to “distract from the substance of what I am saying.”
So what was that substance?
“We have to have a working class-centered politics if we are going to succeed, and also if we are going to stave off the scourges of authoritarianism, which also provides political siren calls to allure people into finding scapegoats to blame for rising economic inequality, both domestically and globally,” she said in Munich. Bemoaning things like NAFTA and the Iraq War, she said, “it is of utmost urgent priority that we get our economic houses in order and deliver material gains for the working class, or else we will fall to a more isolated world governed by authoritarians that also do not deliver to working people.”
This is the thing you should actually have a problem with—not the fact that she stammered before delivering the right answer on Taiwan, but because the thing she thinks she actually pulled off in Munich is utterly bogus, a fictional narrative of progressives that they are fighting “authoritarianism” and pushing “a working class-centered politics” because they stand in political opposition to Donald Trump.
This is just pure fantasy. Donald Trump is no authoritarian; he won the the popular vote by promising to stem mass migration and end free trade and gender transitions for children—and he is now governing by delivering on those exact campaign promises. Meanwhile, he has abided by every single court decision against him, including the patently ridiculous.
That’s not how authoritarians work; it’s how democracy works.
AOC says NAFTA betrayed the working class. True! That’s what Trump’s tariff agenda is all about—reshoring the manufacturing sent overseas by NAFTA. In his first term, Trump literally rewrote NAFTA into the USMCA, the most pro-labor trade deal we ever signed, and he’s spent the majority of his second term trying to convince American corporations to bring manufacturing home, with a lot of success.
What is the Democrats’ answer to NAFTA? What is AOC’s? Why did no one ask her that?
AOC says the Iraq War was a mistake. So does President Trump—it’s why he was the first president in decades not to start any new wars, and why every military operation is so targeted, why his first question before greenlighting any strike has been whether it will entangle us in a war, and if the answer is yes, he scraps it.
So what is this great working-class agenda AOC brought with her to Munich? She told the New York Times that in her meetings, she discussed a global wealth tax and “how to rebut conservative arguments against renewable energy.”
I’m sorry but these just aren’t the keys to the kingdom of working-class prosperity. When’s the last time you heard a working-class person demand to know where we are in the race to carbon zero? And working-class people don’t want a wealth tax; they want better wages. What’s her solution for that? A $15 minimum wage? Give me a break.
We’re seeing what actually delivers higher working-class wages right now: It’s mass deportations and tariffs. But AOC opposes those things. She warned that if we don’t tax corporations, the hoi polloi will fall prey to “political siren calls to allure people into finding scapegoats to blame for rising economic inequality.” This is the real problem with the Democrats and progressives when it comes to working-class politics: They utterly refuse to accept that mass migration is a big driver of the very inequality they pretend to be fighting. And anyone who can see it with their own eyes is being tricked by a “siren call.”
This is the stuff you should have a problem with—everything except the Taiwan answer.
You know this isn’t a working-class agenda because the elites loved it. Though AOC “had anticipated a potentially frosty reception to her anti-establishment arguments,” per the NewYork Times, she had been “pleasantly surprised” by her reception—probably because she told “those folks in nicely pressed suits” exactly what they wanted to hear: fighting climate change is as noble as fighting fascism.
Alas, that’s not exactly a working-class politics. It’s the people she calls authoritarians who are focused on that.
Strategic ambiguity is one thing. Semantic ambiguity, because you can’t frame a sentence, is another.
Even if you don’t agree with their positions…Jefferson, FDR, JFK, …..AOC?!? How far we have fallen.