The Hybrid War Against Brazil: The Geopolitical Siege and the 2026 Elections

 

Hybrid wars operate by saturating the public space, destroying trust, disorganizing social perception, and manipulating real crises.

When new revelations about the relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein began to emerge, the US government shifted the focus of its international agenda with a military escalation against Iran. The timing between a domestic scandal and a foreign offensive cannot be interpreted as mere chance. In the history of great powers, international crises often also serve the function of reorganizing the internal public debate, repositioning leaders and rebuilding legitimacy through war. When this movement against Iran is observed together with recent US policies towards Latin America, the picture becomes even more disturbing.

The aggression against Iran does not only affect the Middle East. It has a direct impact on the global economy, puts pressure on energy prices, affects logistics chains, makes inputs more expensive, and can produce sensitive effects on peripheral or semi-peripheral countries, including Brazil. In a context where economic stability is a central variable in any electoral dispute, a war involving the USA, Israel, and Iran could have concrete effects on inflation, fuel, exchange rates, food costs, and the social perception of well-being. In other words: an international conflict of this magnitude could also interfere with the political conditions for Lula’s reelection.

However, the decisive dimension of this war is geopolitical. The attack on Iran should not be seen as an isolated episode, nor as a mere continuation of its historical antagonism with the USA. Iran occupies a strategic position for China, due to energy and the logistics routes linked to Eurasian integration; it is relevant to Russia for its cooperation in the nuclear sector and its position on the North-South corridor. Furthermore, as a member of BRICS, Iran has become part of a broader arrangement challenging the unipolar order. From this perspective, the aggression against Iran can be read as an indirect attack on Russia, China, and the BRICS group as a whole. The immediate target is a State; the strategic target is the emerging multipolar order.

If this interpretation is correct, Brazil appears as a piece of special value. It is a founding member of BRICS, holds territorial, energy, mineral, food, and diplomatic weight, and remains one of the few nations capable of acting in an autonomous margin between different poles of power. Precisely because of this, it has become a priority target of a new architecture of pressure. This architecture was unashamedly spelled out in the 2025 National Security Strategy, when the USA reaffirmed the western hemisphere as a space for containing rivals, protecting strategic assets, defending critical supply chains, and combating “narco-terrorists,” concluding with the willingness to affirm and impose a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The message is brutally clear: Latin America is once again being treated as a zone of US strategic tutelage, and any change in the hemispheric power architecture directly affects Brazilian sovereignty. It is in this context that recent events cease to appear unrelated.  (more...)

The Hybrid War Against Brazil: The Geopolitical Siege and the 2026 Elections