Trump Is Doing Something No One Wants

Last week, the right-wing president of the United States wrote a pointed letter to the left-wing president of Brazil. With typical brio, Donald Trump threatened to impose steep tariffs as punishment for, among other sins, the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president who is facing criminal charges for his attempt to hold on to power after his electoral defeat in 2022. “This Trial should not be taking place,” Trump wrote. “It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!”

It caused quite a stir. Yet lost amid the fracas was a much quieter, potentially more consequential document signed just a few days earlier in Brazil: an agreement between Chinese and Brazilian state-backed companies to begin the first steps toward building a rail line that would connect Brazil’s Atlantic coast to a Chinese-built deepwater port on Peru’s Pacific coast. If built, the roughly 2,800-mile line could transform large parts of Brazil and its neighbors, speeding goods to and from Asian markets.

It was a neat illustration of the contrasting approaches China and the United States have taken to their growing rivalry. China offers countries help building a new rail line; Trump bullies them and meddles in their politics.

The surreal first six months of Trump’s second stint as president have offered up endless drama, danger and intrigue. By that standard his tussle with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, seems like small beer. But it was a revealing moment, illuminating how Trump’s recklessness compounds America’s central foreign policy problem of the past two decades: How should the United States execute an elegant dismount from its increasingly unsustainable place atop a crumbling global order? And how can it midwife a new order that protects American interests and prestige without bearing the cost, in blood and treasure, of military and economic primacy?

China’s astonishing economic rise, coupled with its turn toward deeper authoritarianism under Xi Jinping, has made answering these challenges more difficult. China now seems to most of the American foreign policy establishment, and even more so to Trump, too powerful to be left unconfronted by the United States. But this line of thinking risks missing America’s best and most easily leveraged asset in the tussle for global dominance with China: Most countries don’t want to choose sides between hegemons. They prefer a world of benign and open competition in which the United States plays an important, if less dominant, role.

Nowhere is that truer, perhaps, than Brazil. A vast nation, bigger than the contiguous United States, it is a good stand-in for many of the world’s middle powers. Contrary to the famous quip that Brazil is the country of the future and always will be, it has managed to become the world’s 10th-largest economy, just a whisker smaller than Canada. It has a long tradition of hedging its relationships with a range of big powers — the United States, China and the European Union — while trying to advance its ambition to be a key player in world affairs.

As the United States’ position as the sole superpower has waned and Brazilian leaders have vied to shape an increasingly multipolar landscape, those efforts have picked up. That has involved, unquestionably, a deepening of its economic and diplomatic relationship with China, its biggest trading partner. Lula traveled to Beijing in May for his third bilateral meeting with Xi since returning to the presidency in 2023, declaring that “our relationship with China will be indestructible.”

The two countries are founding members of the BRICS group, a bloc of mostly developing middle-income countries that includes a number of American antagonists — Russia and, more recently, Iran. American officials have long been wary of BRICS, which has sought in various, mostly marginal ways to thwart American power. But Trump has been outright antagonistic. Last week, as Lula played host to the BRICS summit, Trump blasted off a social media post threatening to slap additional tariffs on any nation “aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS.”

This aggression is hard to square with the milquetoast statements that came out of BRICS, which predictably condemned the bombing of Iran and its nuclear sites but pointedly avoided naming the countries that carried it out, Israel and the United States. While member countries have increased trade among themselves, helping Russia elude Western sanctions, the bloc has made almost no progress on its declared intention of introducing a shared currency to counter the dollar. It is a loose and sometimes fractious group, basically a talking shop.

Some countries within BRICS would like the organization to be more forthrightly antagonistic to the United States, but Brazil, along with India and South Africa, has been resolutely opposed to turning it into an anti-American or anti-Western bloc. “Brazil knows that China is indispensable and the United States is irreplaceable,” Hussein Kalout, a Brazilian political scientist who previously served as the country’s special secretary for strategic affairs, told me. “Brazil will never make a binary choice. That is not an option.”

Indeed, Brazil has much to lose in alienating the United States, and its growing ties with China are as much a symptom of American vinegar as Chinese honey. It does a huge amount of business with the United States, running a trade surplus in America’s favor of about $7 billion last year. America is Brazil’s largest source of foreign direct investment, rising steadily over the past decade in everything from green energy to manufacturing. Lula and Trump may be ideological opposites, but if they were ever to meet, they would have plenty of pragmatic reasons to get along.

Instead, Trump has chosen antagonism. Part of his calculation, clearly, is political. But if Trump thought he was helping Bolsonaro’s right-wing supporters win back power by undermining Lula, his letter appears to have had the opposite effect. Lula, once one of the world’s most popular and celebrated leaders, won a very narrow victory in 2023. His popularity has sagged as he struggles to deliver on his election promise to bring down prices and improve the economy. Thanks to Trump’s attacks, Brazilians are rallying around their president.

But the spat shows something deeper and more important. For many rising powers, China’s supposedly revisionist designs on reshaping the globe pale in comparison to Trump’s shocking use of tariffs, sanctions and military firepower. “From a Brazilian perspective, the country firmly seeking to change the underlying dynamics of the global order is the United States,” Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian German political scientist who has written extensively about BRICS, told me. America, not China, is the wrecker.

This is a shock to the world, and a terrible shame for America. Trump is missing an opportunity that his two predecessors — Barack Obama and Joe Biden — let slip through their fingers: to use America’s waning dominance to shape a new, more egalitarian multipolar order that preserves American influence and power while making room for others to rise. This would be no easy task, requiring painful choices about core American values and commitments. It would also demand humility, a quality few American presidents have shown, in no small part because American voters tend not to seek or reward it.

Americans have now elected a president who seems to have none at all and whose words and deeds brim with an arrogance that even the crudest caricature of the ugly American would not conjure. Even as Trump pledged to avoid foreign wars and entanglements, his vision of peace seems predicated on a form of “America first” dominance that invites the chaos he promises to avoid. This stance makes violent confrontation with China, the only real rival to American primacy, seem almost inevitable — and the return of the grim contestation that characterized the Cold War more likely, whether China desires it or not.

What is certain is that many countries — rich and poor, declining and rising — definitely do not want this. Brazil has its own bitter memories of being a plaything of two great powers engaged in a struggle for dominance. In 1964, the United States supported a coup that overthrew the country’s democratically elected left-wing president, João Goulart, condemning Brazil to more than two decades of brutally repressive military dictatorship. It was a salvo in a bloody proxy battle between the United States and the Soviet Union that left no region untouched by the imposition of despotism and domination.

We are, hopefully, a long way from a return to such a world. Lula, a populist firebrand in his own right, has for now chosen not to take Trump’s rhetorical bait, soberly calling for negotiations. But he has not backed down either. In a television interview, he said if the United States will not come to the table, Brazil will raise its tariffs to match Trump’s. “If they’re going to charge us 50, we’ll charge them 50,” he said. Tellingly, he couched his response in the legal powers recently granted to him by a bill passed this year by Brazil’s legislature. Trump, by contrast, has arrogated tariffs as a personal tool to wield at his will.

The dynamics have been set. Lula, we can be sure, will continue to balance between powers in search of a better future. Trump, on the other hand, seems committed to domination and destruction, in what could prove to be the final nadir of American overreach.