President Trump has announced 50 percent tariffs on India and Brazil, two of the global south’s largest economies. He wants India to cut ties with Russia, even though dozens of countries maintain similar ties without such steep consequences. And he wants Brazil’s government to drop charges against former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is accused of trying to stage a coup after losing the 2022 election. These tariffs are more than trade measures; they’re tools of political coercion, designed to use economic pain to rewrite other nations’ domestic and foreign policies.
But while Europe, South Korea and Japan have acquiesced to many of Washington’s demands on trade, India and Brazil are charting a different path that could reshape how developing countries resist American pressure. Rather than giving way in submission or panic, they’re pushing back — and buying time to activate alternative partnerships that have been years in the making, a policy political scientists call strategic hedging. It’s a survival strategy that is helping nations fight back against Mr. Trump, but paving the way for a more fragmented and dangerous world.
Washington today sees foreign policy through the lens of ally or adversary. For emerging economies, this is a false choice. Strategic hedging means cultivating multiple, overlapping relationships that prevent overreliance by any single major power. Think of it as a geopolitical version of portfolio strategy: Just as investors spread risk across assets, nations spread dependency across relationships. The goal isn’t self-sufficiency but rather preserving freedom of action. When alternatives exist, no single partner can dictate terms.
Brazil and India have spent decades perfecting this approach. Throughout the 1990s, while Washington was basking in its unipolar moment, they were quietly building other relationships out of deep distrust of American power. They watched the United States abandon negotiations it disliked, exempt itself from international jurisdiction and interpret “rules-based order” to mean “our rules, your compliance.” The lesson wasn’t that America was evil but that even benevolent hegemons eventually abuse their power — and that emerging countries could never afford to be entirely dependent on the United States.
Today these countries seem to feel vindicated in their suspicions of Washington, and justified in hedging their bets.
In the wake of Mr. Trump’s tariffs, Brazilian exporters are accelerating partnerships in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Indian firms are expediting certifications and regulatory clearances for an array of products in markets around the world. Both nations’ governments are reviving their quest for trade agreements that bypass Washington, a trend that European countries have also embraced in their own efforts to diversify trade away from the United States. These aren’t perfect substitutes for the massive American market, but they’re enough to avoid caving to American demands.
In this game China offers no real alternative, despite its size. Beijing’s partnerships come with their own dependencies such as preferential trade terms that favor Chinese exports; its neighbors view it with deep suspicion, and its international influence networks still pale beside America’s. BRICS, a bloc of developing countries, provides a forum for coordination but no genuine governance structure. Countries including Brazil and India likely feel they’d be better off standing on their own than joining Beijing’s orbit.
Hedging is a heavy lift. It calls not just for a wealth of trading partners but also for the domestic capacity to use them. Brazil and India’s weaknesses — crony capitalism, crushing inequality and endemic corruption, among other things — limit their freedom of action. They can turn to new markets, but weak governance may make them less appealing to those markets.
Still, even imperfect hedging beats capitulation. Brazil and India are demonstrating that emerging powers can preserve some agency despite both outside pressure and internal deficiencies. From Indonesia to South Africa, from Turkey to the Philippines, other countries are watching closely. These nations have also demonstrated a reluctance to choose between Washington and Beijing and seek space to pursue their own interests. What they’ve lacked is a framework for that resistance — until now.
What Brazil and India show is that strategic hedging can succeed even under duress, if you’re willing to lay the groundwork. They have framed resistance as a stand for sovereignty rather than anti-Americanism. They have spent decades keeping diplomatic doors open despite Washington’s pressure. It’s been hard work, but it’s preserved their agency — at least so far.
The approach has limits — and risks. Many of the world’s most advanced tech, finance and security systems still run through U.S.-led networks. India has been deepening its cooperation with the United States on semiconductor manufacturing and defense, while Brazil’s economy is highly dependent on Chinese demand for its raw materials. Markets may read hedging as risk, pushing up borrowing costs and shaking currencies. In a crisis, “keeping options open” can look like indecision, and shrink leverage with all sides. Even when hedging is a rational strategy for individual countries, it threatens to unravel what remains of global cooperation — a cost even the hedgers may come to regret.
If Brazil and India successfully weather Mr. Trump’s tariffs, they’ll prove American economic coercion can be resisted and other countries will almost certainly develop their own hedging strategies. The outcome, though, won’t be a new world order but managed disorder — a return to the messy multipolarity of the early 20th century, when multiple powers and weak international institutions ultimately laid the foundations for world war.
We may not be headed for global conflict, but neither Brazil nor India harbors illusions about where all of this leads. They know hedging is expensive, that managing multiple relationships requires constant attention, that playing all sides means trusting none. The world they’re helping to create — fractured, fluid, uncertain — offers no guarantee of prosperity or stability. But they also recognize that hegemonic order is ending, whether they participate in its demolition or not. Better to help shape the emerging disorder than be shaped by it.
For American policymakers, the signals should be sobering. Mr. Trump’s tariffs won’t restore American dominance; they’re speeding up its decline. Every arbitrary punishment teaches other countries that dependence on America is dangerous. More and more nations will respond by seeking other partners — even inefficient ones — because autonomy matters more than efficiency when the dominant power can’t be trusted.
The tragedy is that this emerging landscape serves nobody’s interests. Americans will pay more for everyday goods as supply chains fracture, watch the dollar lose its privileged status and see their companies locked out of the world’s fastest-growing markets. Brazilians and Indians will almost certainly face higher prices for imported technology while their economies stagnate. The world will be poorer, more uncertain, more prone to conflict.
This dissolution isn’t inevitable. America could still choose patient diplomacy over economic coercion, building coalitions through compromise rather than diktat. Brazil and India could temper hedging with cooperation on shared interests — technology, finance, even nuclear nonproliferation — that create stakes in stability. But that requires leaders who recognize that new rules for global order need to be written now. The question isn’t whether the old order can be saved; it can’t. It’s whether we can create a new set of rules and institutions or stumble blindly into chaos.
Matias Spektor is a professor of politics and international relations at Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo, Brazil.
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