By Amit Kapoor and Inputs from Meenakshi Ajith
Reforming Multilateralism: A Now-or-Never Moment
Following the two world wars’, the international order was built on the premise that states, even as they competed for advantage, could be restrained by rules and reciprocal obligations. Political scientists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye called this “complex interdependence”; the idea that trade, finance, technology, and institutions could bind countries so tightly that cooperation would be more profitable than coercion. While this was not a flawless premise, its core assumption undeniably reflected the new international economic order. The web of mutual dependence, anchored by multilateral institutions, acted as a brake on naked power, keeping the system from sliding entirely into a raw contest of force. This assumption is now under severe strain. Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the current policy of weaponizing tariffs has brought a brazen rejection of the logic that underpinned the last half-century. Trump’s latest tariff move with Brazil was not about correcting trade deficits or defending industries. It was a tantrum aimed squarely at compelling Brazil to drop its prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro for his role in the January 2023 assault on Brasília. The message was stark: sovereignty is negotiable if your economy depends on us.
Brazil’s response was a textbook demonstration of how interdependence can be leveraged to defend, not erode, autonomy. President Lula da Silva refused to seek a private settlement, calling such an approach “a humiliation.” Instead, he took the case to the World Trade Organization, forcing the dispute into a forum where rules and not personal leverage are supposed to prevail. Domestically, the Bolsonaro prosecution moved ahead without pause. Internationally, Lula began rallying BRICS partners to treat the episode as a test case for the credibility of a rules-based system. This confidence was not improvised. Over the past two decades, Brazil had methodically diversified its trade profile: China now takes 28% of its exports, compared with just 12% for the United States. The Trump tariffs, while headline-grabbing, excluded key sectors like aircraft, energy, and orange juice, limiting their impact to just over a third of export value. Economists estimate the GDP hit at roughly 0.15 percentage points, with 2025 growth forecasts still above 2.3%. Brazil’s ability to stand firm was underwritten by years of economic diversification and institution-building.
For India, the parallels are obvious. Over the last two decades, India’s exports to fellow BRICS countries have increased and it has signed major free trade agreements, signalling a deliberate widening of its commercial base. Yet India’s trade with its immediate South Asian neighbours has hovered between 1.7% and 3.8% and points to an untapped potential. This missing regional integration is not only a lost economic opportunity but a lost layer of strategic insulation. This is where the rhetoric of “reformed multilateralism” must be matched by coordinated action. In recent years, India’s G20 presidency, Indonesia’s ASEAN leadership, Brazil’s stewardship of BRICS, and the “Voice of the Global South” summit have all carried the banner of a fairer, more representative order. It is during moments like this when those pledges must be tested. A rules-based system can survive only if states push back collectively when its norms are under assault.
For India, and for other major actors in the Global South, the lesson is not simply to imitate Brazil’s tactics but to internalize the structural logic behind them. Sovereignty cannot be defended by rhetoric alone; it must be underpinned by robust institutions at home and by coalitions abroad that can absorb the shock of coercive action. Brazil’s resort to the WTO may seem quaint in an era when great powers increasingly sideline multilateral bodies, but it also forces the question: if the Global South does not use these institutions, reform them, and defend them, then who will? Allowing them to atrophy is to cede the field entirely to the politics of muscle. What Lula has made clear is that defending the rules-based order is not the same as defending the status quo. The order we inherited was built with glaring asymmetries, but it remains the only framework capable of constraining raw power if all parties insist on using it. This is where India’s voice becomes essential. As a country that bridges multiple alignments that are democratic but independent, it can help lead an emerging coalition that treats multilateralism not as a talking point but as an enabling ecosystem.
India, like Brazil, also faces pressures on its ecological resources that will test its commitment to sovereignty in new ways. In a global economy where agricultural patents, seed control, and biotech regulation can dictate the fate of rural livelihoods, defending biodiversity is no less strategic than defending maritime borders. A rules-based order worthy of the name must treat genetic resources, environmental stewardship, and traditional knowledge as global commons managed by those who live with them not as commodities to be seized under legal regimes written elsewhere. The current crises in climate, trade, and food security are deeply intertwined; if emerging economies do not set their own collective norms, they will find themselves perpetually reacting to norms imposed from abroad.
What history will remember is not whether Brazil wins its specific tariff dispute, but whether this moment catalyses a broader shift in how emerging economies see themselves in the architecture of global power. Lula’s defiance shows that it is possible to say resist to coercion without turning inward, that it is possible to resist without rejecting the very idea of international rules. The challenge now is for others and especially for India above all to recognize that the defence of sovereignty, the preservation of multilateralism, and the reform of global governance are not separate agendas anymore. They are a single project, and they will succeed or fail together.
The article was published with Economic Times on August 15, 2025.
