Trump can win Brazil and still lose it to China
President Donald Trump’s Washington may be about to get the Brazil it wants, a major piece of the hemispheric puzzle falling into place for the so-called “Donroe Doctrine.“
Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, took 47 percent of the valid vote on Sunday to left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s 45 percent, setting up an October 25 runoff.
Trump has not formally endorsed him, but a Bolsonaro win would give the U.S. its friendliest government in Brasília since the elder Bolsonaro’s, just as Washington tries to loosen China’s grip on strategic supply chains.
China will look on nervously, but much of its groundwork in Brazil is already laid. Those foundations will be tough to break, even with a Trump-friendly Bolsonaro government in power.
The trade data shows why. In the first eight months of this year, Brazil exported $77.1 billion in goods to China, up 15 percent year-on-year, compared to just $24.1 billion to the U.S., down 9.7 percent. That is a ratio of more than 3-to-1.
Two-way trade with China reached $128.6 billion, against $51.4 billion with the U.S. Brazil’s soybean sales to China alone outstripped everything it sold to America. And the gap is widening. A year earlier, the ratio was 2.5-to-1.
Brazil is physically closer to the U.S. and sits in the hemisphere over which Trump is asserting American hegemony. But Brasília is, in many ways, closer to Beijing than Washington.
To be sure, a Bolsonaro victory would be a real prize for Trump. But political alignment cannot repeal economic geography.
A new president can reset Brazil’s diplomatic posture in January. He cannot, at the wave of a hand, reroute the 305 million metric tons of cargo Brazil shipped to China in those eight months.
Trade on that scale doesn’t make Brazil China’s ally, though they are partnered through the BRICS bloc. But it means Beijing’s leverage depends less on who governs Brasília than on the material reality of who buys Brazil’s harvests and processes its minerals.
For evidence, look at Bolsonaro’s coalition. Brazil’s congressional farm caucus endorsed him days before the vote, and Mato Grosso, the heart of soy country, gave him about 65 percent.
Roughly 70 percent of Brazil’s soybean exports from January through August went to China. Washington cannot replace the Chinese customer. It competes with Brazil for it.
Trump’s 2025 deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping commits Beijing to buy at least 25 million metric tons of American soybeans a year through 2028. And since July, Washington has imposed a 25 percent tariff on most Brazilian goods.
Brazil has run this experiment before. Ahead of his 2018 election, Jair Bolsonaro visited Taiwan and accused China of buying Brazil. By October 2019, he was in Beijing, courting Chinese investment.
Over his term, trade with China grew, his government resisted U.S. pressure to shut Huawei out of Brazil’s 5G network entirely, and Brazil stayed in BRICS.
Rare earths, command of which will decide the great power competition in the 21st century, make matters worse.
The younger Bolsonaro told CPAC in Texas in March that Brazil would be “the battleground where the future of the hemisphere will be fought,” and said he discussed rare earths with Trump in the Oval Office in May.
Brazil holds the world’s second-largest reserves but produced less than 1 percent of global output last year. The chokepoint isn’t the mine, but the refinery.
And here’s the difficult truth: China and Chinese-controlled firms handled 91 percent of the world’s rare-earth processing in 2024.
Pela Ema, a mine in the state of Goiás, is Washington’s showcase. About $5 billion in U.S.-backed loans, acquisition money, and price guarantees is converging on it, and last month a U.S. company bought its owner, Serra Verde.
Yet the mine yields only a mixed carbonate, an intermediate product. Separating its heavy rare earths requires a route the U.S. has not proved at commercial scale, so some output may be stockpiled.
Meanwhile, the company’s legacy contracts with Chinese processors run until the end of this year.
All of it unfolded on Lula’s watch, not a Bolsonaro. Washington’s push for Pela Ema was built on capital and guaranteed prices. No presidential sympathy needed.
What Washington still lacks is processing. No Brazilian president can conjure that. The reality is that America will rely on China for rare earths well into the 2030s.
Trump’s own January proclamation warned that even domestic mining does not safeguard national security if the U.S. “remains dependent on a foreign country for the processing.”
Washington’s has time, and it can move quickly. It assembled most of the Pela Ema package within months, and substantial new heavy-rare-earth separation capacity outside China is a few years away, roughly one Brazilian presidential term.
A Bolsonaro government could fast-track permits, court U.S. capital for new deposits, and deliver what Fernanda Magnotta of the Inter-American Dialogue expects: “greater screening of investments in sensitive sectors.”
Pair that with U.S. tariff relief, and by 2030 Brazil could anchor a Western rare-earth supply chain even as its soybeans keep sailing to China.
The runoff can change the U.S.-China contest in Brazil without settling it. What happens next will take shape by the end of a Bolsonaro term, assuming, as all indications suggest, he will triumph in the next round.
If China’s share of Brazil’s exports, about 31 percent so far this year, has fallen below a quarter, Pela Ema’s heavy rare earths are being separated outside China at scale, and Chinese capital is screened out of strategic assets, then Washington won Brazil outright.
But if not, Trump won the palace and lost the ports.
