When Democrat New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) fumbles over her words, pauses blankly at the Munich Security Conference—one of the world's premier foreign-policy events—and won't commit the United States to defending Taiwan if China ever invades, the stumble reveals a geopolitical knowledge gap among America's leaders. Jim Geraghty in the Washington Post called the moment "strategic incomprehensibility."
"Um, you know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is, this is of course a very longstanding policy of the United States," Ocasio-Cortez said as she struggled to answer the question from moderator Francine Lacqua of Bloomberg TV. "What we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point," she added.
Yikes.
AOC, long known for her communications, was instantly hurt by this stumble, and her presidential aspirations will suffer. Her answer to Lacqua revealed that it takes more than being a progressive princess to become the leader of the free world.
Executives in corner offices in Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta shouldn't be gleeful in AOC's stumble. They should draw a very different lesson from this uncomfortable moment: if one of America's most prominent politicians couldn't answer the Taiwan question clearly, what does that say about how prepared your company is for the scenario itself?
Munich was revealing precisely because it was supposed to be a showcase. AOC arrived as the brightest star of the American progressive movement, a potential 2028 presidential candidate testing her foreign policy credentials before an audience of world leaders. Instead, she struggled to articulate a coherent position on the most consequential geopolitical flashpoint of our era. Even sympathetic voices in her own party conceded the stumbles. What was a surefire presidential soft launch venue turned into a hard landing, aka a crash.
But here is the harder truth: most corporate leadership teams would fare no better if pressed on the same question in a board meeting.
The Taiwan Strait is not an abstraction.
Approximately $3 trillion in global trade passes through those waters annually. Taiwan produces the majority of the world's most advanced semiconductors. A Chinese military action against Taiwan, whether a blockade, a missile campaign, or an amphibious assault, would immediately disrupt supply chains, freeze financial markets, trigger emergency sanctions regimes, and force every multinational corporation with Asia-Pacific exposure to make decisions for which most have no playbook. The question AOC couldn't answer is one your risk committee should be rehearsing quarterly.
The conference was ostensibly about security, but the underlying current was geopolitical fragmentation at scale. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio worked to reassure jittery European allies about America's commitment to NATO. At the same time, AOC offered a class-based internationalist framework that left even friendly observers uncertain about its implications for policy. The result was a conference that produced more anxiety than clarity, a signal executives should internalize.
We are operating in a world where American foreign policy is being challenged by both foes and allies, where the traditional rules-based order is under strain from multiple directions simultaneously, and where the next administration, regardless of party, will inherit a geopolitical landscape fundamentally different from the one that existed a decade ago. The business environment your company navigated in 2019 is not returning.
What does this mean operationally?
It means the persistent volatility your procurement teams are managing around tariffs is not a negotiating tactic to be waited out. It is structural. Tit-for-tat trade measures between the United States and its major economic rivals have become a durable feature of the global commercial landscape rather than an anomaly. Supply chain strategies built around cost optimization in a stable geopolitical environment need to be rebuilt around resilience in an unstable one. Capital expenditure decisions that once turned primarily on interest rates now must account for jurisdictional risk, sanctions exposure, and the political durability of bilateral relationships.
The boardrooms that will navigate this era successfully are those that treat government relations and geopolitical intelligence not as communications overhead but as operational infrastructure. Companies need to know which legislators are driving trade policy, which regulatory bodies the Trump administration is weaponizing, and which alliances are under stress before those dynamics produce a crisis that forces a reactive response.
AOC's Munich moment was a preview of the debates that will define the next presidential cycle, and by extension, the policy environment your business will operate within through the end of the decade. Taiwan, NATO burden-sharing, sanctions architecture, export controls, and industrial policy are all live questions with direct revenue implications for multinational corporations.
Caracal Global serves as a fractional Chief Geopolitical Officer for Fortune 1,000 companies and private equity portfolio companies, providing intelligence, strategy, and communications at the intersection of globalization and American politics. Michigan-born and DC-based, Caracal's leadership brings experience in US-China commercial relations, NATO affairs, and national political campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Taiwan question isn't going away.
The executives who answer it strategically, before the crisis forces the issue, will be the ones still standing when it does.
-Marc
Marc A. Ross is a geopolitical strategist and the founder of Caracal Global, a fractional Chief Geopolitical Officer service for Fortune 1000 companies and private equity firms. He publishes the Caracal Global Daily — what a Chief Geopolitical Officer monitors every morning. Subscribe at caracal.global/contact.
