
Trump is doing something no one wants
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.
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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.
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Undo
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.
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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."
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.
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.
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Indian Express
24 minutes ago
- Indian Express
From Obama's ‘treason' to missing gold reserves, the wildest conspiracy theories consuming Trump's Washington
OK, so US President Donald Trump's name is in the Jeffrey Epstein files. But who put it there? Could it possibly have been Barack Obama from his prison cell? Or a tranquilized Hillary Clinton? Oh wait, maybe it was etched onto the documents by Joe Biden's magical autopen. Or is that mixing up different scandals? It's so hard to keep up with the latest wild notions circulating in the capital and beyond. Washington is awash in conspiracy theories these days, a cascade of suspicion and intrigue promoted or denied in the Oval Office, ricocheting around Capitol Hill and cable news and propelled at warp speed across social media. No commander in chief in his lifetime has been as consumed by conspiracy theories as Trump, and now they seem to be consuming him. They have been the rocket fuel for his political career since the days when he spread the lie that Obama was secretly born overseas and therefore not eligible to be president. More than a decade later, Trump is coming full circle by trying to divert attention from the Epstein conspiracy theory with a new-and-improved one about Obama supposedly committing treason. The harmonic convergence of competing conspiracies has overshadowed critical policy issues facing America's leaders at the moment, whether it's new tariffs that could dramatically reshape the global economy or the collapse of ceasefire talks meant to end the war in the Gaza Strip. The Epstein matter so spooked Speaker Mike Johnson that he abruptly recessed the House for the summer rather than confront it. The allegations lodged against Obama so outraged the former president that he emerged from political hibernation to express his indignation at even having to address them. The whispers and questions — 'this nonsense,' as Trump put it — followed the president all the way to Scotland, where he landed Friday for a visit to his golf club. 'You're making a very big thing over something that's not a big thing,' he complained to reporters, suggesting, in his latest bid at conspiracy deflection, that instead of him, the news media should be looking at Epstein's other boldface friends like former President Bill Clinton. 'Don't talk about Trump,' he said. Conspiracy theories have a long place in American history. Many Americans still believe that someone else had a hand in killing President John F. Kennedy, that the moon landings were faked, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job or that the government is hiding proof of extraterrestrial visitors in Roswell, New Mexico. Sixty-five percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters in 2023 that they think there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy's assassination. Some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true, of course, or have some basis. But presidents generally have not been the ones spreading dubious stories. To the contrary, they traditionally have viewed their role as dispelling doubts and reinforcing faith in institutions. President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Warren Commission to investigate his predecessor's murder specifically to keep rumors and guesswork from proliferating. (Spoiler alert: It didn't.) Trump, by contrast, relishes conspiracy theories, particularly those that benefit him or smear his enemies without any evident care for whether they are true or not. 'There have been other conspiratorial political movements in the country's past,' said Geoff Dancy, a University of Toronto professor who teaches about conspiracy theories. 'But they have never occupied the upper echelons of power until the last decade.' Conspiracy theories are not the exclusive preserve of Trump and the political right. Around the time of last month's anniversary of the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, some on the left once again advanced the notion that the whole shooting episode had been staged to make the Republican candidate into a political martyr. Trump, however, has stirred the plot pot more than any other major political figure. In the six months since retaking office, he has remained remarkably cavalier about suggesting nefarious schemes even as he heads the government supposedly orchestrating some of them. He suggested the nation's gold reserves at Fort Knox might be missing, resurrecting a decades-old fringe supposition, even though he would presumably be in position to know whether that was actually true, what with being president and all. 'If the gold isn't there, we're going to be very upset,' he told reporters. It fell to Scott Bessent, the decidedly nonconspiratorial Treasury secretary, to burst the bubble and reassure Americans that, no, the nation's reserves had not been stolen. 'All the gold is present and accounted for,' he told an interviewer. Trump has played to long-standing suspicions by ordering the release of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an act of transparency for historians and researchers that may shed important light on those episodes. But Trump has gone beyond simple theory floating to make his own alternate reality official government policy. Some applicants for jobs in the second Trump administration were asked whether Trump won the 2020 election that he actually lost; those who gave the wrong answer were not helping their job prospects, forcing those rooted in facts to decide whether to swallow the fabrication to gain employment. Trump has likewise claimed that Biden was so diminished toward the end of his term that his aides signed pardons without his knowledge using an autopen. Biden was certainly showing signs of age, but the autopen story was conjecture. Asked if he had uncovered proof, Trump said, 'I uncovered, you know, the human mind. I was in a debate with the human mind and I didn't think he knew what the hell he was doing.' The past week or so has seen a fusillade of Trumpian conspiracy theories, seemingly meant to focus attention away from the Epstein case. Tulsi Gabbard, the president's politically appointed intelligence chief, trotted out inflammatory allegations that Obama orchestrated a 'yearslong coup and treasonous conspiracy' by skewing the 2016 election interference investigation — despite the conclusions of a Republican-led Senate report signed by none other than Marco Rubio, now Trump's secretary of state. She also claimed that Hillary Clinton was 'on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers' during the 2016 campaign. Relying on this, Trump accused Obama of 'treason,' suggesting he should be locked up and going so far as to post a fake video showing his predecessor being handcuffed in the Oval Office and put behind bars. The idea of a president posting such an image of another president would once have been seen as a shocking breach of etiquette and corruption of the justice system, but in the Trump era it has become simply business as usual. For all that, the conspiracy theorist in chief has not been able to shake the Epstein case, which reflects the rise of the QAnon movement that believes America is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Most of the files, the ones that his attorney general told him include his name, remain unreleased, bringing together an unlikely alliance of MAGA conservatives and liberal Democrats. It was well known that Trump was friends with Epstein, although they later fell out. So it's not clear what his name being in the files might actually mean. But Trump is not one to back down. Asked last week about whether he had been told his name was in the files, Trump again pointed the finger of conspiracy elsewhere. 'These files were made up by Comey,' he told reporters, referring to James Comey, the FBI director he had fired more than two years before Epstein died in prison in 2019. 'They were made up by Obama,' he went on. 'They were made up by the Biden administration.' The theories are endless.


Economic Times
27 minutes ago
- Economic Times
US tariff deadline of August 1 is firm, no extensions: Commerce secretary
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News18
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- News18
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