🇺🇸🇨🇳 Playing both sides

As President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva headed to Washington for yesterday’s meeting with Donald Trump, Brazilian diplomats were cautiously optimistic — but quietly fearful that the ideological gulf between the two leaders could produce an embarrassing reprise of the Oval Office confrontation that left Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky humiliated on camera. 

Instead, the meeting lasted nearly three hours and confirmed that the personal rapport between Lula and Trump is, for now, genuinely functional.

The meeting ran far longer than initially scheduled and was notably shielded from the press. It produced…

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