When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered her first major foreign-policy remarks during a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference in February, a moderator asked her whether the United States should send troops to Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. After some pauses, she said: “What we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s answer reflected long-standing U.S. policy on this thorny issue. But explaining strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan doesn’t make for a straightforward sound bite, and critics of the 36-year-old congresswoman went on the attack. “AOC, she was unable to answer a simple question,” U.S. President Donald Trump said. The New York Times and Washington Post derided Ocasio-Cortez’s “stumbles,” ditching standard practice to transcribe her “um”s and “ah”s.

National-security experts saw Ocasio-Cortez’s answer as a misstep in part because she has previously been enigmatic about her foreign policy. She turned down a 2020 invitation to speak in Munich, according to correspondence viewed by Foreign Policy. At the time, she seemed squarely focused on delivering for her New York district.

Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to appear at this year’s conference came amid growing speculation that she will seek higher office in 2028, whether as a contender for senator or even president. Munich is a well-known practice stage for ambitious politicians, and her remarks there attempted to define what a progressive U.S. foreign policy might look like under her leadership. The core question, however, is how she would transform such ideas into policy.

Foreign Policy spoke with 25 current and former advisors, progressive activists, and think tank experts in Ocasio-Cortez’s orbit to map out her views on the Middle East, Latin America, and the world after Trump. (Ocasio-Cortez declined an interview request for this story.) As her star rises within the Democratic Party, some clues about her worldview are starting to emerge.

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Ocasio-Cortez entered national politics after a stunning primary upset against longtime Rep. Joe Crowley in 2018. Backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, she ran a grassroots campaign that rejected money from political action committees and lobbyists. Her win was a bright spot for progressives and young voters fed up with what they felt was an anemic Democratic Party.

When she took office at 29, Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman to serve in Congress, joining other members of the so-called Squad of leftists challenging Trump during his first term. She focused her initial efforts in Congress on delivering for her constituents in the Bronx and Queens, but she has always had an interest in global affairs.

Ocasio-Cortez grew up in a Puerto Rican family, and her worldview was shaped by the island’s neocolonial limbo. “It’s a big part of her identity,” said Pamela Campos-Palma, a national security strategist who previously worked for the Working Families Party, which endorses Ocasio-Cortez. “When you have that lived reality of less advantaged family members on an island that has a colonial relationship, you understand power.”

The inept U.S. response to natural disasters in Puerto Rico has also contributed to Ocasio-Cortez’s focus on climate justice and her push for a Green New Deal, Campos-Palma said.

Ocasio-Cortez majored in international relations and economics at Boston University and spent a semester in Niger, working at a maternal health clinic and studying microfinance. “I was able to communicate and learn with people in a very new way and begin to understand what life is like in a developing country,” she told a student newspaper in 2010. She broke the Ramadan fast at a Nigerien home, which taught her, “no matter what our background, we all have something to share,” Ocasio-Cortez later wrote on Facebook.

Ocasio-Cortez’s initial steps into foreign policy on the campaign trail involved taking a bold position on Israel-Palestine. In 2018, she described Israel’s killing of more than 60 protesters during Gaza’s Great March of Return as a “massacre” on Twitter. But in a PBS interview, one of her first national media appearances, she struggled to explain her views on the conflict. So she called Matt Duss for help.

Duss, then an advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders and a Middle East expert who had worked extensively in progressive think tanks, told Ocasio-Cortez to trust her instincts: Israel did massacre Palestinians, he recalled in an interview. He told her that the blob—that is, the Washington foreign-policy establishment—would pressure lawmakers not to believe their eyes on Palestine or any issue that challenges their monopoly on power, he said.

Duss remained in touch with Ocasio-Cortez’s staff, and top Sanders aide Mike Casca went to work as her chief of staff in 2023. Duss thinks that the media response to Ocasio-Cortez’s Taiwan line was misguided. “I get why people are taking the opportunity to criticize the hesitation, but she got to the right answer,” Duss said. “The more interesting question is, what policy should we pursue to de-escalate, as she said”—not to mention that former President Joe Biden bucked decades of precedent when he said that he would defend Taiwan.

Ocasio-Cortez came into office with more than 3 million followers on Twitter, now X, and today has some 12 million. Her social media celebrity brought more pressure to get everything right. An op-ed in the New York Times in 2018, before she was elected, probed the need for progressives to develop new foreign-policy thinking under the headline “What Does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Think About the South China Sea?” It barely discussed her.

The congresswoman quickly became a foil for centrist Democrats and a caricature of the left’s absence of an international platform. Meanwhile, members of Trump’s right wing derided her with conspiracy theories and racist venom.

Ocasio-Cortez was quickly assigned to the House Oversight Committee, turning usually staid congressional hearings into viral clips by grilling corporate juggernauts such as Mark Zuckerberg. Though that role focuses on domestic issues, it has helped her form a foreign-policy framework focused on accountability. One can imagine Ocasio-Cortez forcing officials of both parties who have pursued reckless wars to face consequences—or working to strengthen adherence to the U.S. Constitution and United Nations Charter.

In 2019, Ocasio-Cortez brought Campos-Palma to then-NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s joint address to Congress. He railed against Russian aggression and sought Trump’s support for a defense pact with Ukraine. Over lunch in the congressional cafeteria with Campos-Palma afterward, Ocasio-Cortez asked what NATO dynamics meant for her constituents.

The congresswoman wanted to figure out how to talk to voters about foreign policy in a way that resonated with the Bronx and Queens; she understood that voters tend to feel checked out from international policies and that progressives have not messaged well on them. “I hate to say this out loud,” Campos-Palma said, “but when it comes to Russia, Ukraine, and like Palestine, Israel, we’re not winning. We’re not making gains.” Ocasio-Cortez began to use her trips abroad to push Democrats to articulate a different way forward.

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In 2023, settling into her third term in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez traveled to Brazil, Chile, and Colombia as part of a delegation of Spanish-speaking U.S. representatives. Though she had visited Denmark in 2019 to promote a global Green New Deal and Japan and South Korea earlier in 2023, her third trip abroad as a member of Congress was “different,” Politico wrote at the time: Rather than meeting chamber-of-commerce types, the delegation connected with leftist leaders, organizers, and activists.

Ocasio-Cortez toured Brasília with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s longtime foreign-policy advisor, Celso Amorim. She met ministers and mayors and visited a protest encampment of the Landless Workers’ Movement, a grassroots group that has fought for land reform in rural Brazil for decades—applying her organizing background to statecraft. “She understands in a way that most Democrats in this country don’t, the link between electoral politics and social movements,” said Andre Pagliarini, a historian at Louisiana State University.

In Chile, Ocasio-Cortez toured the home of Salvador Allende, the socialist president who died in a U.S.-backed coup 50 years earlier. Moved by the photographs and artwork of disappeared activists at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, she said that the United States owed Chile an official apology and pushed for declassifying Nixon administration archives from that period. The Biden administration ended up releasing some of those key documents.

“These questions of empire and the record of the U.S. in Latin America were things that she was very familiar with and wanted to explore more,” said Alex Main, the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who accompanied Ocasio-Cortez on the delegation. “Latin America is what it is today in part as a result of U.S. policies in those countries.”

During the trip, Ocasio-Cortez heard about the harms of U.S. sanctions in Latin America, according to aides who traveled with her and spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid insights on the delegation. Since then, Ocasio-Cortez has continued to highlight the negative effects of sanctions on civilians from Cuba to Venezuela. In a 2023 statement, she called on Biden to “re-examine policy towards Latin America, and stop contributing to the destabilization that drives migration,” mentioning sanctions on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Since the U.S. capture of Maduro in January, Ocasio-Cortez has lambasted the Trump administration’s intervention in the country. “It’s about oil and regime change,” she posted on social media.

In 2023, Ocasio-Cortez met with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, according to a former congressional aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to maintain relationships—a previously unreported meeting. She has been consistent in her criticism of the U.S. sanctions on Cuba and has amplified her criticism this year as the Trump administration implemented a harsh blockade.

“This is what we’ve seen with Gaza—this is a new era of depravity opened up, where there used to be, or there was this stated commitment on human rights that innocent civilians were almost exempt from the rules of war, from blockades,” Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter. She has connected Palestine to broader foreign-policy failures of the Washington establishment, such as an overreliance on military interventions and economic sanctions to achieve U.S. aims.

The Munich Security Conference was Ocasio-Cortez’s first real foray into the blob, however. On stage in February, she laid out a vision that contradicted both Trump and Biden. She called out the “billionaire class throwing their weight around in domestic politics and in global politics” and promised to fight for the working class. She described the shortcomings of a rules-based order that has rarely applied to the United States.

“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 said.

Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who served as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan, has become a close ally of Ocasio-Cortez and was impressed by her performance in Munich. “We come from different places and have different backgrounds,” he said. “If we’re going to combat Donald Trump and MAGA and the growing isolationism in America, we have to go to the root causes of it. … So we’re listening. We’re paying attention to that. Alexandria and I are working together to move it forward.”

Ocasio-Cortez was among the few leaders at the conference who described Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide—and she got applause. “She is saying what a lot of people agree with, including in the audience at the Munich Security Conference,” said Duss, who is now the executive vice president of the progressive Center for International Policy. Duss continues to advise Ocasio-Cortez in an informal capacity: He had brought in experts to brief her on the Middle East and Asia ahead of Munich and played a role in writing her remarks.

Ocasio-Cortez warned of famine in Gaza during a 2024 speech on the House floor. “This is not just about Israel or Gaza. This is about us. The world will never be the same. And we will never be the same,” she said. She had been galvanized by pro-Palestine protests that shut down the Capitol rotunda in Washington and Grand Central Station in New York, according to Beth Miller of anti-Zionist progressive organization Jewish Voice for Peace.

“I think that she really understands the way that outside pressure like that can help influence what members of Congress then do,” Miller said.

In centering income inequality as a national-security issue and standing up for marginalized constituencies, Ocasio-Cortez’s Munich remarks were transformative, said Sara Haghdoosti, the chief of program at progressive group MoveOn. “Giving those ideas a platform,” she said, “is going to open up space for a new generation of thinkers and advocates to be in rooms that they haven’t been able to be in before.”

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Two days after her remarks in Munich, Ocasio-Cortez attended a university forum in Berlin hosted by the center-left German Social Democratic Party. An attendee challenged her to reconcile her position on Palestine with the political party hosting her—which, like most in Germany, is staunchly pro-Israel. Ocasio-Cortez appealed to the importance of building global coalitions to battle authoritarianism. “If we go separately, we will lose it all,” she said. “We cannot let the right win, we just can’t.”

“That answer should have been the viral moment of the trip,” said Patrick Gaspard, an advisor to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former head of the Center for American Progress. Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks captured the urgency of addressing global authoritarianism in a way that leads to “durable success, not episodic success between election cycles.”

But it was her remarks in Munich that made headlines—and invited criticism from all directions. The U.S. right played up unforced errors, such as Ocasio-Cortez saying Venezuela is south of the equator or the rough start to her answer on Taiwan. “I didn’t know she was stupid,” Trump told reporters. He added in a Truth Social post that Ocasio-Cortez “shouldn’t be talking badly about the U.S.A., especially on ‘foreign soil.’”

Writers on the left, meanwhile, argued that her democracy-versus-autocracy framing had reproduced imperial thinking. “Munich is just a crazy world of hawks and neocons,” said an activist, speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to damage political relationships. “You can’t go to Munich and beat the blob.”

Palestine is by far the most divisive foreign-policy issue on the left. Recently, Ocasio-Cortez said she opposes “sending more taxpayer dollars and military aid to a government that consistently ignores international law and U.S. law.” Some activists and commentators remain frustrated that she previously voted for defensive weapons for Israel, such as the Iron Dome, and that she has not disavowed her remarks at the Democratic National Convention in August 2024, where she said that the Biden administration was “working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza” despite reports to the contrary. Last July, vandals posted a sign reading “AOC funds genocide in Gaza” on her Bronx office and splattered it with red paint.

Critics say that Ocasio-Cortez’s softening of her position reflects political expediency, while supporters say she has remained largely consistent on Palestine through her career. Still, Ocasio-Cortez has among the best voting records in Congress on pro-Palestine issues, according to the Institute for Middle East Understanding’s scorecard. “She’s walking into this lion’s den, and whatever she says is going to be disruptive or not enough,” Campos-Palma said.

Ocasio-Cortez may be able to lose the support of the far left in a Senate race and still win. Her net favorability rating among Democrats ages 18 to 34 is a remarkable 81 percent, according to a January survey fielded by the New Republic and Embold Research, and just below that among Democrats overall.

In a hypothetical Senate primary race against incumbent Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, Ocasio-Cortez would win by 19 points, according to a 2025 Data for Progress poll. A recent AtlasIntel poll put her at the top of the pack for the Democratic presidential primaries. And she would beat out Vice President J.D. Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a presidential election, per a TPSI survey released last month.

In Munich, Ocasio-Cortez was joined at a press conference by Crow, the Colorado representative. They advocated a working-class approach to foreign policy. Crow grew up in a Republican family in Wisconsin and thinks that Ocasio-Cortez’s populist message could get the buy-in of Trump voters. Polls show that Americans want a less militaristic approach to the world that prioritizes diplomacy, cuts back on sanctions, and scales back the defense budget.

Some Democratic congressional leaders are stuck in the old way of doing foreign policy, which may be why they ceded the antiwar lane to Trump in the 2024 election. But the deeply unpopular Iran war may provide Ocasio-Cortez a path to lead her party out of the wilderness—in the midterms and beyond. Eventually, that effort might also help her seek higher office.

“We want to build a new foreign-policy infrastructure and vision,” Crow said, “to put Americans, and working-class Americans in particular, back in charge.”