Spectacle not statecraft: Don doing something that no one wants

Last week, the right-wing president of the US 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. The roughly 2,800-mile line could transform large parts of Brazil and its neighbours, speeding goods to and from Asian markets.

It was an illustration of the contrasting approaches China and the US 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 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 US execute an elegant dismount from its increasingly unsustainable place atop a crumbling global order?

These are difficult, thorny questions. Yet instead of answers, Trump offers threats, tantrums and tariffs, to the detriment of American interests.

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 US. 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 US plays an important, if less dominant, role.

Nowhere is that truer, perhaps, than Brazil. A vast nation, bigger than the contiguous US, it is a good stand-in for many of the world’s middle powers. It has a long tradition of hedging its relationships with a range of big powers — the US, China and the EU — 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 a deepening of its economic and diplomatic relationship with China, its biggest trading partner. Lula travelled 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, a grouping American officials have long been wary of. 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.”

Some countries within BRICS would like the organisation to be more forthrightly antagonistic to the US, 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 US is irreplaceable,” says Hussein Kalout, a Brazilian political scientist. “Brazil will never make a binary choice.”

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.

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 characterised 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.

The New York Times