Brazil, after two and a half years of the Lula administration and some six years of the Judicial Board led by Minister Alexandre de Moraes, is mired in the worst diplomatic crisis it has experienced since September 7, 1822. For the fat rats of the government, it is yet another opportunity to show off, show off their patriotic credentials, and feign courage without taking any risks. For Brazilians, who will pay every last drachma for this loss, it is a lose-lose game.
There's no way to win. Decent Brazilian citizens must stand by Brazil, out of basic moral imperative—right or wrong, my country comes first. In the current conflict with the United States, Brazil is wrong, or its government is wrong, which in practice amounts to the same thing. But Brazilians are sold and underpaid in this situation: the option of siding with a foreign power is unavailable, and everyone will now have to enter a fight they never want to buy.
In truth, neither the Brazilian people nor the United States wanted to fight. The only ones who wanted to fight were the Lula administration, the Che Guevara Club to which the Supreme Court has been reduced, and the most extremist factions that now govern Brazil. Did Donald Trump make demands that no country can accept, even with the burden of 50% tariffs on its exports to the United States? He did. But who did everything to create the situation here in Brazil that led Trump to adopt the sanctions? That's pure Lula-STF.
There is nothing that Lula did not do in his third term (apart from the others) to announce to the world:"Brazil is an enemy of the United States." Brazilians never asked for this - but the president and the extreme left that today guides what he thinks, says and does, have dreamed for 40 years of a Brazil with severed relations with the Americans, or as distant, cold and hostile as possible.
Lula appointed as commander of his "foreign policy" a mummy from the era of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Sugar Cane Cutters, a Hamas activist (he wrote the foreword to a book about the terrorist group's diplomacy), and a guarantor of the elections in Nicolás Maduro's Venezuela. He allowed warships from Iran, which the free world officially considers a terrorist country, to dock in Rio de Janeiro. He said that Trump's election would be"the return of fascism."
Lula proposes the end of the dollar as a currency for international trade. He called in a Chinese expert to"regulate" social media in Brazil. He accuses Israel of"genocide" and flirts with the idea of severing ties with the country Brazil helped found. He blames Ukraine for the invasion of its own territory. He effectively supports the theft of elections in Venezuela and has made Brazil an uncompromising ally of every dictatorship in the world. He has also become one of the most anti-Semitic countries on the international stage—in fact, it has just withdrawn from the Holocaust Remembrance Association.
It's simply unreasonable to expect the US government to simply look at all this and assume there's no problem. Obviously, there is. Just as Russia doesn't agree with the presence of NATO missiles on its borders, the United States also doesn't consider it a good idea to stand by passively as an increasingly aggressive enemy forms on its doorstep. It's possible, perhaps, to harass the United States from afar. Up close, it's a different story.
To create the perfect storm, the Supreme Federal Court threw itself body and soul into supporting Lula's holy war—it itself declared its own private war against the United States, transforming Brazil into a pariah state in the global democratic community. It did this by eliminating the national legal system, human rights, and public freedoms to punish the regime's political enemies with its lawsuits against the"coup." Incidentally, the world is increasingly aware of the sordid details of what the Supreme Federal Court is doing—and it's tough to play the role of"Trump's victim" when you're locking 74-year-old women in prison and forcing them to use wheelchairs for posing a risk to the security of democracy.
Lula, with the support of many, accuses anyone who disagrees with his irresponsible foreign policy behavior of being saboteurs, traitors to the nation, and enemies of Brazil—a series of acts that are objectively harmful to the country. It is obviously in Brazil's national interest to maintain the best possible relations with the world's greatest economic, military, and political power; China, for example, believes it is essential to its efforts. Lula doesn't think so. Since the beginning of the conflict, instead of seeking common ground, he has dedicated 100% of his time to insulting, attacking, mocking, lying, and demagogic—everything but seeking understanding.
What can we say about a president who says, regarding his main negotiator in the conflict:"Alckmin wants to negotiate with everyone; the problem is that no one wants to negotiate with Alckmin." Seriously? Lula never wanted to negotiate anything with the United States. If he had, he wouldn't have anything to propose. If he had a proposal, he wouldn't know how to reach the decision-makers in the American government. As the crisis revealed, Brazil simply doesn't have the structure to address important issues with the United States; it has access to Hamas and the PCC, but not to the greatest power on the planet. Are these the patriots of today?
