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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
dude willingly aligned himself with the worst leaders of our century
absolute clown
dude willingly aligned himself with the worst leaders of our century
absolute clown
Brazil’s president is losing clout abroad and unpopular at home
Summarize
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva put Brazil on the map, but he hasn’t adapted to a changed world
Jun 29th 2025
This illustration shows Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a suit with Brazil's presidential sash holding a large blue balloon. A hand with a pin is about to pop the balloon. The background is the Brazilian flag.
Illustration: Lehel Kovács
On June 22nd, hours after the United States struck Iranian nuclear sites with huge bunker-buster bombs, Brazil’s foreign ministry put out a statement. It said that Brazil’s government “strongly condemns” the American attack, and that the strikes were a “violation of Iran’s sovereignty and international law”. This strength of language put Brazil at odds with all other Western democracies, which either supported the strikes or merely expressed concern.
Brazil’s friendliness with Iran is set to continue on July 6th and 7th when the BRICS, a group of 11 emerging-market economies including Brazil, China, Russia and South Africa, holds its annual summit in Rio de Janeiro. Iran, which became a member of the BRICS in 2024, is expected to send a delegation. The club is currently chaired by Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula. Originally, being a member had offered Brazil a platform from which to exert global influence. Now it makes Brazil look increasingly hostile to the West. “The more China transforms the BRICS into an instrument of its foreign policy, and the more Russia uses the BRICS to legitimise its war in Ukraine, the harder it will be for Brazil to keep saying it is non-aligned,” says Matias Spektor of the Fundação Getulio Vargas, a university in São Paulo.
Brazil’s diplomats are trying to get around the problem by focusing the summit on innocuous themes: co-operation on vaccines and health care; the green-energy transition; and maintaining most-favoured nation status as the basis for international trade, in which countries treat all members of the World Trade Organisation equally. They want to avoid chat on a subject America’s president, Donald Trump, particularly hates: a BRICS-led effort to settle trade in local currencies rather than the dollar. Brazil’s diplomats would probably prefer it if the Iranians stayed quiet, too. “We are in a moment of damage containment more than a moment of creating new instruments,” says a senior Brazilian diplomat.
Brazil’s role at the heart of an expanded and more authoritarian-dominated BRICS is part of Lula’s increasingly incoherent foreign policy. He has made no effort to forge ties with the United States since Donald Trump took office in January. There is no record of the two men ever meeting in person, making Brazil the largest economy whose leader has not shaken hands with America’s president. Instead Lula courts China. He has met Xi Jinping, China’s president, twice in the past year.
Perhaps Lula’s most sensible tack has been an attempt to take advantage of the world’s loss of trust in America as a trade partner. He has cosied up to Europe and expanded trade ties. In March he visited Japan, which imports most of its beef from the United States, to push Brazilian meat as a substitute. His ministers have been meeting with Chinese bureaucrats to discuss ways to increase Brazilian agricultural imports, probably at the expense of American ones.
But this comes with grandiose efforts which far outrun Brazil’s weight on the world stage. In May Lula was the only leader of a big democracy to attend Moscow’s commemorations of the end of the second world war. He used the trip to try to convince Mr Putin that Brazil should mediate an end to the war in Ukraine. Neither Mr Putin nor anyone else listened.
There is little pragmatism closer to home either. Lula does not speak to his Argentine counterpart, Javier Milei, because of ideological differences. When he assumed office for the third time, in 2023, he embraced Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocrat, despite the country having become a full-fledged dictatorship. (The relationship only soured after Mr Maduro overtly stole another election last year.) Having led the UN mission to stabilise Haiti after an earthquake tore the country apart in 2010, Brazil now stays mum as Haiti collapses into a gangster-run hellscape. Lula appears unwilling or unable to rally Latin American nations to present a united front against Mr Trump’s migrant deportations and tariff war.
Weakness on the world stage is compounded by Lula’s slipping popularity at home. During his first two terms as president, from 2003 to 2010, Brazil reaped the rewards of a commodity boom, and he was one of the most popular leaders in the world. His domestic strength lent him credibility abroad, and many of his peers saw him as a figurehead for fast-developing economies.
Now, though, Lula is increasingly unpopular in Brazil. The country has shifted to the right. Many Brazilians associate his Workers Party with corruption, due to a scandal that landed him in jail for over a year (his conviction was later annulled). He built the party on support from trade unions, socially-minded Catholics and poor recipients of government handouts. But today Brazil is a country where evangelical Christianity is booming, where employment in agriculture and the gig economy is growing fast, and where the right offers handouts too.
Lula’s personal approval ratings hover around 40%, the lowest of any point during his three terms. Only 28% of Brazilians say they approve of his government. On June 25th Congress humiliated him by rejecting a decree he had passed to raise new taxes. It was the first time in more than 30 years that lawmakers had overturned an executive decree, and will leave the government with less fiscal space for spending ahead of next year’s general election.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s MAGA movement is closely aligned with Brazil’s hard right, led by Jair Bolsonaro, a former president who styles himself a tropical Trump. Mr Bolsonaro is likely to be jailed soon for allegedly plotting a coup to remain in power after losing an election in 2022. He is yet to anoint a successor to lead the right. But if he does so and the right rallies around that person ahead of the election in 2026, the presidency will be theirs to lose.
Mr Trump freely criticises other leaders who are much friendlier with him than Lula. Yet he has said almost nothing about Brazil since taking office in January. In part, that may be because Brazil benefits from something no other large emerging economy possesses: a whopping trade deficit with the United States, amounting to $30bn a year. Mr Trump certainly likes it when other countries buy more from the United States than they sell into it. But his silence may also be because Brazil, relatively distant and geopolitically inert, simply does not matter that much when it comes to questions of war in Ukraine or the Middle East. Lula should stop pretending that it does, and concentrate on matters closer to home.
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India backs Dalai Lama's position on successor, contradicting China — Reuters
A senior Indian minister has said that only the Dalai Lama and the organization he has set up have the authority to identify his successor as the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism, in a rare comment contradicting rival China's long-held position.
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China and Russia Keep Their Distance From Iran During Crisis
Some U.S. officials talked about an “axis” of authoritarian nations, but the American and Israeli war with Iran has exposed the limits of that idea.
July 6, 2025Updated 11:19 a.m. ET
A scorched car in the middle of rubble outside. In the background, flags are lined up in front of buildings.
An ambulance burned in an Israeli attack in Tehran last month. Despite the appearance of unity, Russia, China and North Korea did not rush to Iran’s aid during its war with Israel or when U.S. forces bombed Iranian nuclear sites.Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Edward Wong
By Edward Wong
Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent in Washington and former Beijing bureau chief who has written a new book on China.
When Russia enlisted the aid of China, North Korea and Iran in its war against Ukraine, some American and British officials began talking about a new “axis.”
It appeared that the four countries were united by anger, authoritarianism and animus against the United States and its allies.
But Iran’s sales of drones and ballistic missiles to Russia for its war and oil shipped to China did not pay off when it mattered, raising doubts about unity among the nations.
None of the other three states rushed to aid Iran during its war with Israel or when U.S. forces bombed Iranian nuclear sites. China and Russia, by far the two most powerful countries among the four, issued pro forma denunciations of the American actions but did not lift a finger to materially help Iran.
“The reality of this conflict turned out to be that Russia and China didn’t run to Iran’s rescue,” said Alexander Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “That just exposes the limitations of the whole ‘axis’ idea.”
“Each of them is pretty selfish and doesn’t want to get embroiled in the wars of others,” he added. “These are very different wars and different sets of conflicts. The countries are not necessarily sharing the same structures and values and institutional links the same way the U.S. and its allies do.”
The four nations all have autocratic systems and harbor hostility toward the United States, which traditionally has aimed to weaken them and challenge their legitimacy. The countries also have some strategic ties and have undermined U.S.-led economic sanctions by doing commerce and sharing weapons technology with one another.
“Yes, there is probably a very modest amount of coordination among China, North Korea, Iran and Russia — in the sense that they talk with each other and have some of the same frustrations with the United States or with the West,” said Michael Kimmage, a history professor at Catholic University of America and a former State Department official who has written a book on the war in Ukraine.
“But it’s not particularly meaningful,” he added.
Among the nations, only Russia and North Korea have a mutual defense treaty. Besides providing weapons to Russia, North Korea has sent more than 14,000 troops to fight alongside the Russians against Ukrainian forces.
Their bond is rooted in a shared Communist past and the anti-American war on the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953, in which Mao’s China also took part.
That history also accounts for the close ties between China and Russia, one of the most consequential bilateral relationships for the U.S. government and much of the world. The leaders of the two nations have forged a personal bond over many years, and their governments announced that they had a “no limits” partnership just weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
China still sees value in abiding by some of the international norms promoted by a pre-Trump America and democratic nations, and it has refrained from sending substantial arms aid to Russia during the war. But it has helped to rebuild Russia’s defense industrial base, U.S. officials said, and it continues to be one of the biggest buyers of Russian oil.
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Russia and Iran have never had that type of relationship.
One issue is religion. Iran is a theocracy with the type of ruling body that the other three secular, traditionally socialist nations regard with suspicion. Both Russia and China view the spread of Islamic fundamentalism with alarm. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has taken extreme measures against even moderate Muslims, suppressing some Islamic practices among ethnic Uyghurs and Kazakhs in his country’s northwest.
“There are no shared values beyond vague platitudes about the ‘multipolar world order,’
and there are quite a few contradictions,”
said Sergey Radchenko, a Cold War historian at Johns Hopkins University. “Putin indicated what they are: His relationships with Iran’s neighbors, including Israel and the Arab states, are too important to sacrifice on the altar of Russian-Iranian friendship.”
“He is a cynical manipulator interested only in his strategic interests, and if this means throwing Iran under the bus, then he is prepared to do this,” Mr. Radchenko added. “To be sure, the feeling is fully reciprocated in Tehran.”
Mr. Putin and President Trump spoke about the Israel-Iran war on June 14, and Mr. Putin offered to mediate. Afterward, Mr. Putin said publicly that Russia had helped Iran build a nuclear power plant and was assisting with two more reactors.
While he spoke of Russia’s partnership with Iran, he signaled a reluctance to commit to aiding the country in the war.
“We are not imposing anything on anyone — we are simply talking about how we see a possible way out of the situation,” Mr. Putin said. “But the decision, of course, is up to the political leadership of all these countries, primarily Iran and Israel.”
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met with Mr. Putin in Moscow on June 23, a day after the U.S. airstrikes on Iran, but the Russian summary of the meeting had little beyond the usual expressions of diplomatic support. That day, Iran carried out a symbolic missile attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar and then agreed to a cease-fire with Israel and the United States.
China also watched from the stands as the crisis unfolded.
Mr. Xi said that all sides “should work to de-escalate the conflict.” And when Mr. Trump ordered the American strikes on Iran, China said it strongly condemned the attacks and accused the United States of violating the United Nations Charter.
But like Russia, China did not send material support to Iran. Although China does sometimes take an official position on conflicts in the region, it also often tries to appear noncommittal in order to balance interests. For years, it has been building up its ties to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two rivals of Iran. Saudi Arabia, like Iran, is a big oil exporter to China.
An extended regional war would jeopardize China’s oil imports from those countries, so it seeks to quell hostilities rather than stoke them.
China’s aim of being a neutral broker in the Middle East became evident in March 2023, when it helped finalize a diplomatic rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
China also used that opportunity to develop closer ties with Iran’s partner in the region, Syria, ruled then by Bashar al-Assad.
That was a period when China’s influence in the Middle East was at a peak, said Enrico Fardella, a professor at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” who has taught at Peking University and studies China’s foreign policy. Now, with Iran weakened by the war and Mr. Assad overthrown by rebels, China is treading carefully around the Iran-Israel conflict to see which governments and political groups or militias in the region emerge as the most powerful.
“While Beijing has a vested interest in promoting a cease-fire and post-conflict stabilization, its current low-profile diplomacy suggests limited confidence in its ability to influence events,” Mr. Fardella said in a text message. “As in post-Assad Syria, China may once again adopt a wait-and-see strategy, carefully repositioning itself to salvage influence in a rapidly shifting post-conflict landscape.”
Yun Sun, a scholar of China’s foreign policy at the Stimson Center, a research institute in Washington, argued that the “axis” formulation for China, Russia, Iran and North Korea was still valid. Although the four countries do not have a mutual defense agreement binding all of them, she said, they share an “anti-U.S., anti-West and anti-liberal democracy” outlook.
“An alignment short of mutual defense is an alignment after all,” Ms. Sun added. “The fact they won’t fight for each other in a war does not make their cooperation and collective positioning less of a challenge. China has provided nuclear and missile technologies to Iran. It has bankrolled Russia’s war and kept North Korea on life support.”
But there are limits to China’s support for Iran, Ms. Sun said, adding that Chinese officials lack confidence in Iran’s theocratic leadership, and that they see Iran as having “been too naïve, opportunistic, indecisive and wavering in its external relations.”
Chinese officials are also aware that Iran, like North Korea, is an isolated country and needs China, despite occasional ebbs in the relationship.
On June 26, after Iran agreed to a cease-fire with Israel, Iran’s defense minister, Aziz Nasirzadeh, made his first trip abroad since the war began — to the Chinese city of Qingdao for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Eurasian security group led by China and Russia.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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Lula tells Trump world does not want 'emperor' after US threatens BRICS tariff — Reuters
Developing nations at the BRICS summit on Monday brushed away an accusation from President Donald Trump that they are "anti-American," with Brazil's president saying the world does not need an emperor after the U.S. leader threatened extra tariffs on the bloc.
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Guess they invited Dilma to distract from the only 3 women were present?
Bunch of backwards authoritarian failed states
I thought she was in jail?
Lula tells Trump world does not want 'emperor' after US threatens BRICS tariff — Reuters
Developing nations at the BRICS summit on Monday brushed away an accusation from President Donald Trump that they are "anti-American," with Brazil's president saying the world does not need an emperor after the U.S. leader threatened extra tariffs on the bloc.
Guess they invited Dilma to distract from the only 3 women were present?
Bunch of backwards authoritarian failed states
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lol nah
That’s her to the far right front row
Meeting with President of the New Development Bank Dilma Rousseff
On the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin met with Dilma Rousseff, President of the New Development Bank established by BRICS countries.
en.kremlin.ru
‘Brics bank’ blasts West ahead of leaders’ summit, China mute on tariffs
At New Development Bank meeting, Brazil’s Lula and NDB’s Rousseff slam US-led financial order, as China and India stress pragmatism.
www.scmp.com
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Opinion | World must be more wary than ever of China’s growing economic power — Guardian US
Autocratic regime is malign actor on world stage and its efforts to undermine others’ economic resources must be limited
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China, India should continue practical cooperation, Chinese VP tells Indian minister — Reuters
China and India should steadily advance practical cooperation, China's Vice President Han Zheng told India's External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Monday, the official Chinese news agency said.
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lolwut
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Russia, Iran and China intensifying life-threatening operations in UK, police say — Reuters
Russia, Iran and China are behind a growing number of life-threatening operations in Britain including attacks and kidnappings, often deploying criminals and sometimes children as proxies, two senior British police officers said on Tuesday.
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People should speak out wow