Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva feels comfortable at the United Nations. He has plenty of experience speaking before the body, having governed Latin America’s largest nation from 2003 to 2011 and again since 2023. He is also an advocate for multilateral governance, valuing the U.N. as a platform that allows so-called developing countries to exert influence and participate meaningfully in shaping global decisions.
“Let my first words before this World Parliament be of confidence in the human capacity to overcome challenges and to move toward higher forms of partnership, both within and among nations,” Lula declared at the outset of his first address to the annual U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) more than 20 years ago.
But if Lula has one thing in common with the world body’s most vocal critics—chief among them U.S. President Donald Trump—it’s that he doesn’t believe the U.N. is meeting this tumultuous historical moment. The two leaders ran into each other backstage this week at UNGA and had a brief, unplanned exchange that could pave the way for a thaw in U.S.-Brazil relations.
By tradition at UNGA, the Brazilian head of state speaks first, followed by the U.S. president. In his speech on Tuesday, Lula warned that both multilateralism and democracy were under severe strain, threatened by authoritarianism and the erosion of international law. He positioned Brazil as an example of democratic resilience, citing the recent conviction of former President Jair Bolsonaro, Lula’s predecessor, for seeking to override the results of the 2022 presidential election.
Lula also reiterated his frequent call for major U.N. reform to give the global south a greater say in international governance, among other things—a proposal that earned wide applause in the hall. He insisted that democracy must not be limited to staid proceduralism but deliver social justice at the national and international levels. “There is a clear parallel between the crisis of multilateralism and the weakening of democracy,” he said.
And in a not-so-subtle rebuke of Bolsonaro’s backers, including Trump, Lula decried a “subservient far right” in his country for enabling undue foreign intervention. The Trump administration applied the Global Magnitsky Act and other sanctions on members of Brazil’s Supreme Court, their family members, and other government officials as punishment for Bolsonaro’s prosecution. Lula’s defense of Brazilian sovereignty in the face of this unprecedented hostility improved his poll numbers at home even as the country’s relationship with the United States reached perhaps its lowest point ever.
Trump addressed the General Assembly next, agreeing with Lula’s sentiment that the U.N. is not living up to its potential—but departing dramatically from the Brazilian president on the upshot of that observation. In a meandering address, Trump slammed the U.N. as a “globalist” failure, asserted that Europe’s immigration policies were “destroying” their countries, and dismissed climate action as the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
Several analysts have argued that Lula is part of an illiberal, anti-U.S. alliance. They point to his embrace of BRICS, the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa that recently added five new member states. But watching both Lula’s and Trump’s speeches at UNGA, one could not help but wonder which leader was supposedly threatening the international order.
Lula has consistently advocated for a multipolar world order that includes diverse voices, particularly from the global south, to strengthen the multilateral institutions that the United States helped build in the wake of World War II.
During Lula’s first presidency, he championed debt relief for poor nations, pushed for bold climate commitments, and helped broker a nuclear deal with Iran in 2010 that the United States then scuttled. More recently, he has turned to coalitions of the global south to advance similar goals: hosting a summit of Amazonian nations to coordinate environmental policy, launching initiatives to combat hunger and food insecurity, and calling for joint diplomatic efforts to mediate conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. Through these moves, Lula has sought not to undermine the international order but to expand the cast of characters who can shape it.
If anything, the flippant attitude of various U.S. presidents has made it more difficult for the U.N. to reach its multilateral ideal. President George W. Bush notably bypassed the Security Council to invade Iraq in 2003, inflicting lasting damage on the body’s credibility as a guarantor of international law. President Barack Obama, while rhetorically more supportive of the U.N. mission, relied heavily on unilateral drone strikes abroad to bypass the Security Council.
Now, the Trump administration has compounded these strains by withholding funding to the U.N., forcing the organization to scale back core operations—from humanitarian aid in Gaza and Sudan to peacekeeping missions in Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These moves have weakened the very institutions that the United States once helped design, leaving more space for alternative coalitions such as BRICS to gain ground.
Lula’s chief foreign-policy advisor, Celso Amorim, noted in July that Trump’s expansive sanctions and tariffs had deepened ties within BRICS. Lula has insisted for years that his embrace of BRICS does not derive from anti-Americanism but from a desire for a more equitable global order. That said, the bloc is hardly a monolith. Its members include undemocratic states such as Russia, China, and now Iran, whose practices often clash with the democratic aspirations that Brazil and other members, such as South Africa, seek to embody.
Lula maintains that his goal is to leverage the combined size and geopolitical weight of BRICS countries to strengthen—not undermine—the U.N. founding mission: to promote peace, shared prosperity, and human rights through multilateral action. Whether this aim is achievable is a separate question from whether Lula is sincere in pursuing it.
One of the elements that makes UNGA valuable, despite its often stilted atmosphere and predictable talking points, is its ability to convene leaders and diplomats from around the globe, offering a rare forum for direct dialogue, negotiation, and coalition-building. Even amid bureaucratic slog and political posturing, the event still features surprises.
Such a moment occurred on Tuesday after Lula left the dais and encountered Trump, who was preparing to speak next. Trump noted in his speech, in a clear deviation from his prepared notes, that the two leaders had exchanged a hug and brief words, with Trump mentioning that they enjoyed “excellent chemistry.” Following that exchange, Trump said the two leaders would meet next week.
For Lula, this brief yet friendly recognition was a potential diplomatic coup. Trump appeared blithely unaware that he was even supposed to be angry with Lula. “He seemed like a very nice man, actually,” Trump said of Lula during his address. “I liked him. … And I only do business with people I like.”
Lula’s last major engagement in New York was a side event on democracy, held Wednesday alongside Chile, Colombia, Spain, and Uruguay, where he delivered a reflective speech on the rise of right-wing authoritarianism. Although the gathering pointedly did not invite a U.S. representative, Lula was careful not to mention Trump by name.
Members of the Brazilian far right sought to spin Trump’s surprisingly warm remarks toward Lula as a cunning strategic chess move by the U.S. president to expose Brazil’s leader as a demagogue eager to make political hay out of tensions with the United States.
Journalist Paulo Figueiredo, who along with congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro has been among the most avid Brazilians in stoking the U.S. trade war on Brazil, hailed Trump as a “genius” for placing Lula in an “impossible position”—forced to sit at the negotiating table only to “hear truths and negotiate something he cannot deliver.” Surely amnesty for Jair Bolsonaro would soon follow, Figueiredo concluded. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president’s son who decamped to the United States this year to lobby the White House full time on his father’s behalf, echoed that line, portraying Trump’s posture as deliberate brinkmanship.
Their reading of events strains credulity. After all, if Trump were so keen to corner Lula, he could have agreed to a meeting sooner. Members of the Lula government have for months tried and failed to reach interlocutors in Washington.
The moment of personal connection that Lula and Trump shared at UNGA burst the bubble of half-truths, lies, and self-serving hysterics that the Brazilian far right has spent months cultivating in Washington. Their narratives may envelop the U.S. president again in the days to come, but—for now—a door that Figueiredo, Bolsonaro, and company had pulled shut was opened by Trump himself, of all people.
The kind of introduction that Lula and Trump enjoyed could only happen at the U.N. “That which seemed impossible has ceased to be impossible,” Lula said in a press conference on Wednesday, adding that it’s important that his dealings with other world leaders include a basic level of respect. At least in passing, Trump offered that this week. The two presidents’ short exchange was a small reminder, with potentially substantial results, of why the U.N. still matters.
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