Lula Opened UNGA81 Accusing Powers Of Using Tariffs As 'A Weapon Of Coercion And Blackmail'
UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 1 Of 15
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"We are called to choose between multilateralism or unilateralism, democracy or extremism, sovereignty or subordination," Lula told world leaders, speaking shortly before US President Donald Trump took the same podium.
It was the tenth time Lula had opened the debate, a role Brazil has held by custom since the 1950s. He said it was the most critical moment for the United Nations since he first addressed the Assembly in 2003, and that the feeling driving him was indignation.
His sharpest words were reserved for the rules of global trade. "The pillars of multilateralism are being corroded. The World Trade Organization is on life support," he said. "When governments capitulate in the face of those who use tariffs as a weapon of coercion and blackmail, the consequences are disastrous."
Lula did not name the United States in that passage. Washington imposed sweeping tariffs on Brazilian goods last year, which Trump linked to the prosecution of Lula's predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, now serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest for an attempted coup. "Despite the US tariffs against our economy, this year we will hit a new record of exports," Lula said.
The dispute has become entangled with Brazilian politics ahead of the October 4 election, and Lula used the podium to warn against outside interference. "We will not allow the enemies of democracy, whether domestic or foreign, to undermine popular will," he said. "Brazil will continue to be a sovereign country."
He was just as blunt about the UN's own failings. "The UN is failing in one of its most important missions: to rid humanity of the scourge of war. Its credibility has never been lower," he said. He blamed much of the paralysis on the Security Council and the veto. "We are all held hostage by the inaction of the Security Council," he said, noting that Brazil had spoken out against the veto since the Assembly's first session in 1946.
He called for regional conflicts to be contained before they became "tragedies of global proportions", said there would be "no winners on the battlefield" in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and said generations of Palestinians would carry the trauma of what he called the genocide of women and children in Gaza. He also criticised the weakening of the World Health Organization and pressure on the International Criminal Court.
The speech drew together the threads that run through much of the Global South's critique of the current order: economic coercion, a Security Council frozen in the power arrangements of 1945, and an insistence on sovereignty in the face of outside pressure. Lula closed by urging member states to find the political will to make the UN a "temple of peace" once again.
The national statements delivered at this year's UN General Assembly left little doubt about how far the ground has shifted. Opening the debate, Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders that "we are clearly moving towards a multipolar world" and that the movement is irreversible, though he warned it could take the shape of fragmentation and transactionalism rather than a networked order rooted in international law. The backdrop was hard to miss: a US-Israeli war with Iran nearly seven months old, the US capture of Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro in January, and a US President who used the same podium to say he was weighing a deal with Tehran against "annihilating" it. Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said the World Trade Organization was on life support and condemned the use of tariffs as "a weapon of coercion and blackmail", while India's S. Jaishankar declared that the post-1945 order is giving way to new realities. Türkiye's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Spain's Pedro Sánchez, from very different vantage points, both called for an end to the veto held by the Security Council's five permanent members. Russia's Sergey Lavrov went further, telling the Assembly that "the dictatorship of a single hegemon has run amok" and that a fairer, multipolar order was emerging. What remains unsettled is not whether power is spreading but whether the institutions built in 1945 can adjust fast enough to hold it together.