Lydia Polgreen: Contrast: While China builds, Trump meddles and threatens

Earlier this month 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 This Trial should not be taking place Trump wrote It is a Witch Hunt that should end RIGHT NOW It caused quite a stir Yet lost amid the fracas was a much quieter potentially more consequential document signed just a insufficient days earlier in Brazil an agreement between Chinese and Brazilian state-backed companies to begin the first attempts 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 -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 In cio 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 plan matter 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 hard thorny questions Yet instead of answers Trump offers threats tantrums and tariffs to the profound 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 arduous China now seems to bulk of the American foreign protocol 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 preponderance easily leveraged asset in the tussle for global dominance with China The bulk 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 fundamental 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 multiple of the world s middle powers Contrary to the famous quip that Brazil is the country of the future and invariably will be it has managed to become the world s th-largest commercial sector 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 contestant 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 declaring that our relationship with China will be indestructible The two countries are founding members of the BRICS group a bloc of mostly growing middle-income countries that includes a number of American antagonists Russia and more just now Iran American personnel have long been wary of BRICS which has sought in various mostly marginal procedures to thwart American power But Trump has been outright antagonistic This month 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 Particular 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 explained 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 pact surplus in America s favor of about billion last year America is Brazil s largest source of foreign direct expenditure rising steadily over the past decade in everything from green strength 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 of popular and celebrated leaders won a very narrow mastery in His popularity has sagged as he struggles to deliver on his voting promise to bring down prices and improve the market system Thanks to Trump s attacks Brazilians are rallying around their president But the spat shows something deeper and more major For multiple 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 informed 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 Related Articles Patrick Knight What s the plan if our expansive new family-leave law doesn t work as imagined Letters With accusations of more huge fraud in Minnesota these questions come to mind ML Cavanaugh We desperately need a dose of Truth Justice and the American Way Jonathan Levin Powell s caution on tariff-driven inflation is right David Brooks America s response to the new Cold War is weak and self-defeating We can do better 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 a great number of countries rich and poor declining and rising definitely do not want this Lydia Polgreen writes a column for the New York Times