Trump's Secret War on Brazil
The 50% tariff on Brazilian imports in July 2025 wasn’t the opening shot—it was the closer. Publicly, the White House billed it as hardball over “unfair practices.” Privately, it capped a years-long, multi-front squeeze designed to pry Brasília away from Beijing: reciprocal-tariff powers, targeted trade cases, and pressure campaigns that bled from steel to 5G. The tariff itself is on the record; the wider playbook—phantom financing offers, leverage built from crises, and a carrot-and-stick tech strategy—emerges from leaked files and off-the-record briefings. The result? Collateral damage at home and abroad, plus a strategic own goal: rather than isolating Brazil from China, the squeeze hardened Brasília’s hedging instincts and deepened regional skepticism about Washington’s reliability. What looked like a tariff tantrum reads, in full, as a modern shadow war—economic instruments wielded in the open, coercive tactics in the dark—and a case study in how decoupling gambits can boomerang.
