At the UN General Assembly, which took place in New York last month, member states normally speak in a carefully determined order based on their level of representation, preference, and geographic balance. But, following long-standing tradition, Brazil — which does not come first alphabetically or even sit on the Security Council — has been the first country to give a speech, followed by the United States. The practice started in the days when almost no country wanted to speak first; Brazil offered to, and the courtesy gradually hardened into tradition. That protocol was suddenly freighted with meaning this year.

For months leading up to the assembly, Washington and Brasília had been locked in a bitter standoff. In July, enraged by the prosecution of his ally Jair Bolsonaro and a Brazilian supreme court ruling, which held social media platforms liable for disinformation, Trump slapped Brazil with tariffs of 50 percent. When President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) took the podium, he began by insisting that Brazil’s democracy is not up for grabs — a strong line that he has publicly maintained since the standoff first erupted.

Then his tone sharpened: he warned of “false patriots” who “plan and publicly promote actions against Brazil,” and reiterated that “our democracy and our sovereignty are nonnegotiable.” Without naming names, Lula managed a single rebuke that cut multiple ways: at Trump’s soft authoritarianism; at Bolsonaro at home, now serving a twenty-seven-year sentence for his own attempt to undermine Brazil’s democratic institutions; and, implicitly, at the former president’s son Eduardo, who pushed Trump to impose tariffs on Brazil and seems eager to take up his father’s mantle.

Trump’s subsequent speech took even the most seasoned Brazil-watchers by surprise. In a meandering address in which, among other things, he announced to the delegates that their “countries are going to hell,” Trump suddenly softened his rhetoric toward Lula, praising their “excellent chemistry,” recounting a brief embrace in the corridor, and announcing a meeting next week. He even added, “He seemed like a very nice man . . .  he liked me, I liked him.” Moments later, though, Trump boasted that the United States was “hitting [Brazil] back very hard” and warned they would “do poorly” without Washington.

The two leaders appeared to make headway in a “friendly” video call on Monday, trading personal phone numbers and sketching plans for a future meeting. Still, whether that tone holds or their next encounter devolves into another Oval Office shouting match remains to be seen.

Lula’s tone, by contrast, surprised no one. For months he has been cast as the rare Latin American leader willing to answer Washington with steel: he continues to insist that the judiciary must be free, that sovereignty is “not up for negotiation,” and that Brazil won’t bargain over prosecutions. This stance has set him apart from other regional leaders and boosted his approval at home, even among some centrists, by tapping into a dormant patriotism that many had shelved during Bolsonaro’s piecemeal attack on Brazilian institutions.

That defiance resonated far beyond the marble hall of the UN. On September 10, thousands of people from the Left and center unfurled a huge Brazilian flag on São Paulo’s main thoroughfare. It was a pointed response to the far right, who had controversially rolled out a humongous American flag in the city — on Brazil’s Independence Day — only two weeks prior (authorities are now probing whether it was the same one displayed at an National Football League game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Chargers in the city days before). Rio de Janeiro, meanwhile, echoed São Paulo with a characteristically musical protest. Crowds danced to a legendary lineup of Brazilian musicians — Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Paulinho da Viola, Djavan, and Chico Buarque — whose dictatorship-era protest songs cloaked defiance in metaphor to evade censorship and remain relevant today without a lyric changed.

A skeptic might object that Lula’s stance is hardly extraordinary. After all, a Brazilian president has no constitutional power to interfere with the nation’s highest court, even if the majority of its justices happen to agree with his views on national sovereignty. But that alone is not enough to explain the president’s conduct. When Colombia’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro, turned back US military planes carrying deportees in January 2025, he could plausibly claim a legal basis for his decision. Yet that rationale dissolved almost instantly when Trump retaliated with threats of 50 percent tariffs and visa revocations. The leaders of Mexico, Honduras, and Venezuela have all discovered, in similar fashion, the steep costs of defying Washington.

Why, then, has Lula stood firm while so many of his regional counterparts have folded?

These symbolic acts and Lula’s assertions of national sovereignty are important, but they are a response to the deeper geopolitical movements that have enabled them. Mainstream coverage has fixated on symbols, but the story is structural.

For decades, Washington’s influence over Brasília rested on trade, aid, and the threat of tariffs. That leverage has eroded. Lula can defy Washington because Brazil no longer depends on the United States the way it once did. Over the past two decades, a new behemoth has taken its place: China.

The shift toward China began even before Lula’s first presidency and has only accelerated across Brazil’s wildly different governments, including Bolsonaro’s. After China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, its trade with Latin America grew about 31 percent annually for eight years; by 2009, China had overtaken the United States as Brazil’s top trading partner and primary export destination. And by 2024, China was the destination for 28 percent of Brazil’s exports, while just 12 percent went to the United States. Because Brazil is a relatively closed economy, with exports making up roughly 20 percent of GDP, sales to the United States amount to barely 2.4 percent of its output.

The divergence is even more marked in import volumes: Between 2019 and 2024, the volume of goods Brazil imported from China soared by 98 percent, while the volume from the United States fell by 23 percent. Brazil — now China’s main supplier of soy, beef, corn, sugar, and poultry — imports higher-value-added manufactured goods from China and, since 2019, has relied on it more than the United States for high- and medium-high-technology goods. In short, the partnership has proved largely symbiotic and stable, especially in comparison to Washington’s volatility.

Brazil has not merely weathered Trump’s bouts of trade unilateralism — it has profited from them. When, in 2018, China imposed retaliatory tariffs on American goods in response to Trump’s first US-China trade war, it turned to Brazil as an alternative supplier of crucial commodities. That year, US soybean exports to China plummeted by 75 percent, while Brazilian soybean exports to China ballooned by $7 billion.

In the midst of this most recent spat, soybean imports hit a record high. Beyond commodities, China has made important investments in Brazil, begun to introduce yuan-denominated “panda bonds” and even proposed to build, with the Lula administration’s cooperation, a 3,000-mile railway tethering Brazil’s agricultural heartlands to a new, Chinese-built deep-water port in Peru, dramatically decreasing shipping times. Meanwhile, Trump’s 50 percent tariff blitz has started to bite at home, prompting his own commerce chief to float exemptions for goods the United States doesn’t produce and spurring a bipartisan push in Congress to carve out goods like coffee and cocoa.

This shift of Brazil’s economic center of gravity toward China has naturally increased the superpower’s influence within the region. Yet as Beijing itself stressed in a post on X during July’s tariff-war chaos, its money comes with fewer strings than the United States’: “We have already made our position clear. Tariff wars have no winners. Unilateralism serves no one’s interests.” In Brazil, many economists acknowledge risks from Trump’s tariff blitz but see them as short-term turbulence rather than a threat to the country’s longer-term ambition of becoming a Southern Hemisphere economic powerhouse.

Trump’s sudden warmth toward Lula has therefore puzzled observers who see the former as a demagogue acting out of loyalty to Bolsonaro. That is partly true, but, seen against the economic backdrop, Trump’s sudden softness looks less like magnanimity and more like a recognition of diminished US leverage. Perhaps it is not a change of heart but a last-ditch effort to claw back influence over Latin America’s largest economy — leverage squandered through years of erratic unilateralism. In trying to disguise decline, Trump has only exposed what he least wants to admit: the United States has lost its grip on Brazil.