August 14, 2025

Trump is BRICS' greatest champion

De-hegemonic achievement unlocked

Hello and welcome to the dispatch. This week we scan the latest frontiers of Trump’s trade war, from India to Brazil, amid the US pressure campaign against Russia. We end in Alaska, where Putin is slated to meet Trump on Friday. Is a new world order taking shape before our very eyes?

Our next essay for The Polycrisis on Phenomenal World will be about insurance. In the meantime, you can email us (Kate here; Tim here); follow us on Bluesky (Kate, Tim, Polycrisis account). And do join our 2026 book club over at the discord channel.

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On August 6, Trump punished India with an additional 25% tariff (bringing the total to 50%) for buying Russian oil in an executive order. The EO’s title — Addressing threats to the US by the Russian Federation — made it clear that this wasn’t about bilateral US-India trade imbalances.

Weeks before that, Brazil had also been hit with 50% tariffs for putting ex-President Bolsonaro on trial for his 2022 coup attempt. Lula has not budged on Brazil’s sovereignty, calling the tariffs “unacceptable blackmail” in an interview to the New York Times. Poking Trump in the eye, Lula said that if the January 6 Capitol riots had happened in Brazil, Trump would be facing prosecution just like Bolsonaro.

Trump’s threats caused shockwaves in India, and embarrassed the Modi government that has portrayed itself as the big winner of the US-China divorce since the 2018 trade war.

Interviewed at Democracy Now, Professor Jayati Ghosh pointed out “there’s so many double standards in this particular recent announcement of Trump, because it’s not just that other countries, like China, are buying Russian oil. The European Union is buying Russian oil. The US is buying various Russian exports”.

The response from the Indian government was rapid: embrace BRICS. Modi’s national security advisor Doval hurried off to Moscow where he hailed the “strategic and special partnership” with Russia during a “tumultuous situation” in the world. Modi swiftly announced that at the end of August he would go to Beijing — his first trip to China in seven years — for the security-focused multilateral Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Completing the BRICS embrace, Lula has spoken to Modi, Putin and Xi to discuss boosting economic ties, modelling self-reliance for the global south, and a joint BRICS statement, reported Politco.

The rapid strengthening of BRICS under US pressure is a further illustration of the geometry of fear and the limits of US power. As we wrote in our inaugural polycrisis essay in 2022 soon after Ukraine war began: “Developing countries’ answer to West’s question,“Do you want to contain China with us?” is probably “Yes.” But the answer to the question, “Do you want to contain China and Russia with us?” is probably “No.”

YOU COULD NOT SEE ALASKA COMING

For better or for worse, this week could change the world. Putin and Trump are going to meet on US soil for the very first time. The announcement of a US-Russia summit to negotiate a ceasefire in the Ukraine War shocked Europe and dumbfounded people worldwide. The last time that anyone was so “perplexed, horrified, or excited” by a summit, wrote Sergey Radchenko, “was when former US President Richard Nixon visited communist China”.

“And it is Europeans, in particular, who stand to lose out. The very venue of the summit—in Alaska—is helpful to Putin insofar as it underscores that Russia and the United States, as neighbors, have many shared interests apart from what is happening in Europe. These include energy ties; the Arctic; and, indeed, the shape of the future world order.”

For his part, Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy on Tuesday said the US has received a signal from Russia that it may be "ready to end the war, or at least to make a first step towards a ceasefire. This was the first such signal from them".

SUMMER PODCASTS AND BOOK CLUB

—Here are the books we voted upon for the 2026 Polycrisis Book club. Join our discord to read along, one book per month for the rest of the year.

1. Neomercantilists - Helleiner

2. Extractive Capitalism - Khalili

3. Inflation: A guide for users and losers - Blyth & Fraccaroli

4. Crude capitalism - Hanieh

—Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Liz Chatterjee discussed his book ‘More and More and More’ at a panel hosted by the new Indian research organisation Sustainable Futures Collective. Many of us think it’s companies that are blocking the transition, but Fressoz’s book is on the intellectual history of the very idea of an “energy transition” and how it gained power. Don’t miss Chatterjee’s scholarship upending Western-centred accounts of our planetary impasse — the Asian Anthropocene (not the Capitalocene!) and the Late Acceleration (not the Great Acceleration!)

—Delhi’s Center for Science and Environment has a new Carbon Politics podcast centering the needs and interests of the global south. Check out climate justice pioneer Sunita Narain’s reflections “33 years after Rio — what have we learnt?”, and her classic text from 1990 Global Warming in an Unequal World: A case of environmental colonialism

—Kyla Scanlon’s brooding essay runs a thread through the American shatterbelt and the major economic stories of the year:

"I write about the 3 Americas: one built on AI speculation, one held together by healthcare, and one running on memes"

…“the US offers nothing more than AI and various types of gambling and volatile tariffs, whereas China has offered massive advancements in science and technology and a future that people can actually believe in.”