“Great leaders are not those who start wars, but those who put an end to conflicts,” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reminded President Donald Trump in a Aug. 21 phone call initiated by the Brazilian President. The two discussed the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, in particular, according to the official readout issued by the Presidency of the Republic reported by Agência Brasil.
Lamenting the UN Security Council’s paralysis in the face of these—and other—conflicts, Lula proposed that an extraordinary session of the United Nations Security Council be convened to seek diplomatic ways out of the world’s wars.
Lula had previously made the same proposal to Presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, so the proposal has now been put to three of the Council’s five permanent members, by the president of a country that is not one of them.
It is also important that the heads of state of the two largest countries in the Americas have again spoken, and that according to the Brazil readout, the discussion was cordial. This was the first substantive discussion between the two since their Dec. 2, 2025 phone call. That had also been cordial, but that was before Trump ordered the January 3rd Venezuelan invasion, and the State and War Departments full-press campaign which followed insisting that the other countries of the Western Hemisphere follow U.S. orders, “or else.”
Lula focused on two hotly contentious bilateral issues. He argued that the new 25% U.S. tariffs slapped on Brazil, on false grounds, damage both countries. Trump agreed on the need to maintain strong commercial ties and proposed that their negotiating teams meet as soon as possible, according to Brazil’s report. No report on the call was made by the U.S. side, but later on Friday, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer called the Brazilian Minister of Development, Industry, Trade and Services, Marcio Elias Rosa, to set a date for talks to begin.
As to fighting organized crime and drugs: Lula reiterated that Brazil wants to cooperate with the U.S. on this, but “it will not accept interference”—a reference to the U.S. designation of Brazil’s drug gangs as terrorists, after asserting its “right” to unilaterally intervene against “terrorists” anywhere. Lula emphasized that Brazil’s strategy is “to financially strangle organized crime,” empower the Federal Police to take stronger measures, and build-up the police coordination between the eight Amazonian nations (plus French Guiana) through the Amazon International Police Cooperation Center established in Manaus, Brazil in September 2025.
President Lula told an election campaign rally later that day that he had spoken with President Trump “and made it clear: … A country that respects itself demands respect. And Brazil knows how to defend its sovereignty.”