Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez avoided saying whether she would support strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities if ongoing negotiations with Tehran over its program end without an agreement.
Asked at the Munich Security Conference if she would support direct strikes on the country’s nuclear facilities, AOC said such a scenario would be a “dramatic escalation that no one in the world wants to see.”
“What the regime is doing in regard with protesters is horrific. The slaughter of tens of thousands of people. Now I think that jumping into strikes is, there’s still so much we can do to avoid that scenario,” she added.
The topic was present at the security conference during the weekend. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham also weighed in, urging President Donald Trump to overthrow the regime and warning that “it will be a disaster” if he doesn’t.
Speaking at a panel held by Politico during the sidelines of the conference, Graham said that such a scenario would mean that “you can’t rely on America.” “It means the Western world is full of crap. All they do is talk and when rubber meets the road they don’t do a damn thing,” he added.
Tensions continue to run high in the Middle East as negotiations between the U.S. and Iran continue. The U.S. announced it will send a second aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, along with its strike group.
Trump, however, has said that Tehran “wants to make a deal very badly” and is engaging in a serious manner. “Last time they didn’t believe I would do it,” Trump said in reference to the attack against the country’s nuclear facilities in June. He said back then “they overplayed their hand” but this time things are “very different.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Trump on Wednesday to discuss the matter. The BBC reported that Trump insisted that talks with Tehran must continue and reiterated that he will take action if he doesn’t consider them to be successful. The outlet added that Iran has suggested it is ready to limit its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, but has remained intransigent on other demands.
AOC also slammed Trump’s foreign policy more broadly in the conference, saying his administration is “looking to withdraw the U.S. from the entire world so that we enter an age of authoritarians who can carve it up.”
She went on to say that Trump’s end goal is to “command the Western Hemisphere and Latin America and his personal sandbox.”
Such a global scenario, she added, would allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to “saber-rattle across Europe and try to bully our allies there” and authoritarians to “essentially control their own geographic domains.”
Originally published on Latin Times
