Transcript: Inside AOC’s Foreign Policy Vision

Writer Jonathan Guyer says that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is presenting a different foreign policy vision than previous Democrats who have ran for president.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 28 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Jonathan Guyer. He’s the program director at the Institute for Global Affairs. He’s also been a great writer about foreign policy for a long time, most notably at The American Prospect and at Vox, and he has a new piece out about AOC that we’ll get into in a bit. But Jonathan, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Jonathan Guyer: Great to be with you, Perry.

Bacon: So the piece you wrote recently, that we’re going to talk about, is called “AOC Meets World,” and it was in Foreign Policy very recently. So give us an overall sense of what made you decide to write about AOC’s foreign policy? I think there’s obvious reasons, but what made you kind of want to write about her in terms of foreign policy context?

Guyer: I think she represents this leftward tilt of the Democratic Party, and also—I don’t want to say the failure, but the ambiguousness of the left’s foreign policy. I think the left, and a couple of the experts in the piece said this, has not always had a great strategy when it comes to foreign policy. It’s been a big question mark. And I think if you talk to people in and out of Washington, they’ll say, I don’t really know what AOC’s foreign policy is. Which is, I don’t think, entirely correct. I think she has a pretty developed worldview. She’s taken a lot of positions on Gaza, on Latin America.

But the impetus for this piece is, I think she is really dipping her toe into world affairs. She spoke at this major foreign policy conference in February, the Munich Security Conference, which is where the contenders for the next primaries go and sort of strut their stuff. Gretchen Whitmer was there, a number of other muckety-mucks.

So the idea that this was her first time there—and my reporting showed that she’d been invited before in 2020, decided not to go. She’s really associated with this DSA grassroots push to take care of her constituents in New York, focus on domestic policy.

But I think, as we’ve seen with the Democratic Party over the past decade, you can’t really separate domestic policy and foreign policy. You and I have had a lot of these conversations over the years. You can’t separate them. The way America conducts itself domestically reflects its role in the world.

So I think part of this piece was trying to figure out, how does one of the shining stars of the Democratic Party, the most popular or among the most popular possible candidates for the next presidential—how is she figuring out who she is? And it’s not like she fell out of a—what is it—a coconut tree, like Kamala said.

Bacon: Yeah, I was going to say.

Guyer: She has a very developed worldview, AOC. It’s just, she’s, I think, a really all-star politician, carefully messaging and developing strategies and talking with some very intelligent people. But obviously, there’s a lot we can get into here.

Bacon: So the thing that struck me by you saying is—we’ve had this sort of, I don’t want to say new left, but this sort of more developed progressivism, that started with Sanders’ 2016 campaign and grows from there. That has mostly been focused, I would argue, on domestic politics—Medicare for All, anti-billionaires, anti-plutocracy. I would say the first seven, eight years of that was really focused on that.

But I would argue in some ways now, the leading issue, or one of the leading issues of that, is a foreign policy issue. I would say the war in Gaza. And it’s a critique of both the Republicans, but also it’s a critique of the Biden administration and centrist Democrats. So I don’t know if the left has a foreign policy vision. It certainly has a vision on that foreign policy issue, I would say. You agree?

Guyer: I would even broaden it a little bit, in that the domestic issues that AOC is most associated with, like you say—fighting against the oligarchy, she joined this tour with Bernie Sanders. Climate, Green New Deal. Immigration. Obviously, a member of the squad who pushed back, part of that resistance in Trump 1.0. Those are actually global issues. None of those are really domestic alone.

And I think there’s been this kind of job of the great monks of Washington foreign policy to cordon off domestic and foreign policy—and this has been going on since the Cold War—and saying to the young guns like AOC and many others, Hey, leave foreign policy to us. We’re the experts. And I think what she does when she goes to Munich is she takes all of these dynamics that have been a big part of her career—as youngest member of Congress to be elected as a woman, someone who is part of that kind of Democratic contender who ousted an incumbent and represented all this—and said, Hey, fighting the oligarchy is part of foreign policy, and is part of the reason we have a Trump presidency for the second time. That’s part one.

The second part is, I think on Gaza, she’s largely been consistent. I went back—one of her first interviews, I think she wasn’t even elected yet, she had just won the primary—was on PBS, and she described a massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, and obviously setting in the structural dynamics, what’s been happening in Gaza, has been an occupation and violence for several decades. So she kind of said this and got incredible pushback, and also wasn’t really fully briefed on it. I think she had the right message, but couldn’t explain it right to a TV audience. To her credit, she was a newly minted contender, and so forth.

So part of this piece was trying to figure out, how did she go from there to now, where I think she has a pretty developed point of view on Gaza and has gotten a lot of flak from the right, a lot of flak from the left. But I’d say if you look at her messaging over time, it’s been pretty consistent.

So when she warns of famine in Gaza in 2024, when she’s put out some very strong criticism of the Biden administration or the Trump administration, or when she goes to Munich and calls what’s happening in Gaza a genocide—it’s not really part of this new left moment. It’s part of a progression over time, where she has been trying to bring in some of these principles towards US foreign policy. And I think, as we know, principles and US foreign policy don’t always mix, for worse, I would say.

Bacon: I want to separate out a little bit what the left is doing and what AOC is doing—those are related—and then come back together a little bit. So I do see Gaza as a seminal issue of left foreign policy right now. Do you agree?

Guyer: I do, yeah. And I think it’s like a new Vietnam, and a litmus test, and there’s only one right answer, I would say, for the left and for the new generation of DSA contenders who are trying to shape not just domestic policy, but foreign policy.

Bacon: And a related question—there’s a piece in The New Yorker about the Biden foreign policy. And so I think you’re also seeing this issue, but I’m curious what you make of it, is what I perceive as an effort almost to say that Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer, the architects of Joe Biden’s Gaza policy, should be disqualified from membership in Democratic leadership in the future. They shouldn’t get these big jobs in the future. That’s my sense of what’s going on.

Talk about that a little bit, in terms of what the left is trying to do about the people who were involved in Biden’s foreign policy.

Guyer: Absolutely. So I’d say this even........

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