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