'An attitude without any rationality,' says Haddad about Trump's tariff hike against Brazil

For Finance Minister Fernando Haddad , US President Donald Trump's decision to impose a 50% tariff on imports of Brazilian products is a 'rational' response to the fact that Brazil is seeking partnerships with other countries around the world.

The head of the economic team discussed the Trump administration's new tariff hike and the consequences for Brazil during a press conference held by the Barão de Itararé Independent Media Center this Thursday, the 10th.

"The fact that Brazil is a multilateral country, insists on multilateralism, does not make an automatic, dogmatic, ideological alignment, opens itself to the world, seeks partnerships, this cannot serve as a pretext for an attitude without any rationality, without any balance," said Haddad in response to CartaCapital .

Geopolitical situation

The minister said that "Brazil is too big to be an appendage of an economic bloc." He emphasized that trade interests with Europe, China, and the United States are equivalent.

"The US is the country with the largest capital investment in Brazil. The stock of American investment in Brazil is very significant. Brazil's exports to China and the trade surplus with China are very important for Brazil. The agreement with the EU, from an economic perspective, has one dimension, but from a geopolitical perspective, it is very important for us to avoid 'rebipolarizing' the world, which will be detrimental to all of us. We have complementarity with the EU that can be exploited, including from the perspective of reindustrializing the country," he stated.

Trump has been promoting a genuine shift in global trade rules, challenging the foundations of a trading system dominated by the United States in recent decades. Haddad believes that the current context, marked by China's rise, is linked to the collapse of a globalization model that has dominated the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This model, he argues, has produced imbalances that are still being felt.

"Brazil believes in sustainable globalization. Neoliberal globalization really didn't work. It produced enormous imbalances. This is largely due to the Global North's prescription. It was the Global North that placed neoliberal globalization as the ultimate goal, the ultimate goal of the end of history. What happened was that there was a race, and in that race, China came out on top. Are we going to criticize China for seizing the opportunities that presented themselves to develop, after a hundred years of humiliation?" he asked.

The paradoxes of the right

By confirming that Brazil will be subject to much higher tariffs than it was accustomed to, Trump acknowledged that he was implementing the measure not solely based on economic grounds. By using the tariffs as an instrument of political coercion, the Republican decided to retaliate against Brazil because former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL), a supporter of his, is being prosecuted for attempted coup d'état.

It turns out that prominent figures on the Brazilian right and far right, such as São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans), find themselves in a contradictory situation. An open Trump supporter, Tarcísio will now have to contend with the fact that Trump's decision will directly harm São Paulo producers who export to the US.

"The governor made a big mistake," Haddad said. "Either a person is a presidential candidate or a vassal candidate. And there's no room in Brazil for vassalage. Kneeling before a unilateral aggression without any economic basis, without any political argument," the minister said, criticizing Tarcísio's stance, which attempted to criticize President Lula for the White House's decision.