March 26, 2025 (EIRNS)—Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s Special Advisor on Foreign Affairs Celso Amorim discussed how nations around the world, Brazil among them, are called upon to rethink their approaches to the complex challenges facing the world, in the midst of the ongoing upheaval in the world order. It is an upheaval as big, in his view, as the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of the U.S.S.R., he said in a lengthy interview published March 22 by Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo.
“My generation has gone through two huge structural changes. The first was the end of the Soviet Union. And now we have another huge, huge change, with the Americans reneging on the order they themselves created,” he said. The previous multilateralism of the U.S. (the “hypocrisy” of working through the UN, and when that didn’t work, through NATO) and “missionary” democracy, are over. President Trump “does not hide his self-interest. It’s an attitude of absolute frankness…. He wants Greenland not because it’s good for peace, but because of the country’s minerals. He says that about Ukraine, too. I think Trump looks at the immense size of Russia, a country that has 12 time zones, and imagines the investment possibilities. He doesn’t want to be totally at loggerheads with Russia.”
There is a positive side to this frankness, Amorim noted, pointing to statements by Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the U.S. does not want Russia and China to become such enemies that nuclear war results.
He addressed his European friends bluntly: “The Europeans are disoriented. They have become accustomed to living under the American moral, military and economic umbrella. When suddenly an American President arrives and says `I’m going to look after my own interests, you can take care of yourselves,’ they are totally perplexed….
