At the end of February 2026, attention outside the United States is focused not on a single issue but on a peculiar "bouquet" of Washington's decisions and gestures. A new round of Donald Trump's tariff war, his attempt to quickly push negotiations on Ukraine toward a deal, the US's retreat from the climate agenda, and the explosive rise of American tech giants in AI — all of this together forms an image of an America that acts abruptly, unilaterally and often presents its partners with faits accomplis. Ukraine sees the US as both the architect of a future peace agreement and a strict "regulator" of its concessions. France notes a "Trumpization" of the West — from tariffs to climate and AI. Brazil looks at the situation more pragmatically: as a window of opportunity in trade, but also as a source of dangerous instability.
One of the central themes, surfacing in Kyiv, European capitals and the South American press alike, is Trump's strategy on Ukraine and his desire to "close" the war by the symbolic date of July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of US independence. In Ukrainian discourse the American line is perceived as a mix of pressure and paternalism: according to Bloomberg, allies say the US seeks to clinch a deal by that date, but European officials stress a lack of signs that Moscow is ready to accept an agreement without its key demands being met, while Volodymyr Zelensky insists that US security guarantees must first be agreed and ratified by the US Congress. Russia's Gazeta.Ru, relaying these assessments, highlights the skepticism of former Verkhovna Rada deputy Volodymyr Oleynyk, who considers it unlikely the conflict will end this year precisely because of Kyiv's list of demands to Washington and Zelensky's own political vulnerability. In the Ukrainian expert field the American plan is analyzed, for example, by ZN.ua: it recounts three scenarios discussed in the Wall Street Journal, where the American vision of peace is built around the idea that Ukraine would cede some territories in exchange for a Western military "shield," unacceptable to Moscow. In this picture the US is the chief architect of frameworks and guarantees, but at the same time a source of pressure on Kyiv over territorial concessions, which is extremely unpopular in Ukrainian society.
French commentators view Trump's moves more through the prism of global leadership and trust in the US. American initiatives on Ukraine and nuclear control overlap with the expiry of the New START treaty and new US consultations with Russia and China on a future architectural agreement on strategic arms, which independent media DOXA, for example, covers in detail by following the Geneva rounds and stressing that Washington is trying to restart control over nuclear arsenals precisely at a moment when its unilateral actions on trade and climate irritate allies. For Paris this is a dual position: on the one hand, without the US there will be neither nuclear control nor effective deterrence of Russia; on the other, Trump demonstratively ignores collective formats and devalues agreements — be it the Paris climate accord, from which his administration has again withdrawn the country, as La Tribune reminds in a piece about the US exit on January 27, 2026, or trade arrangements with the EU.
Against this backdrop, in Brazil the US line on Ukraine sounds much weaker than in Europe, but still filters through the economic context. Latin American press more often mentions Ukraine in connection with grain, fertilizers and energy, where Washington's decisions — sanctions, price caps, licensing regimes — affect global prices. However, decisive for the Brazilian agenda now is not this, but Trump's sharp maneuver in trade policy, which unexpectedly made Brazil one of the countries "winning" from the new order.
The new global US tariffs introduced by Donald Trump after the Supreme Court decision have arguably become the world's most discussed recent topic related to America. In Brazil several outlets analyze how the US is abandoning finely calibrated bilateral trade schemes in favor of a blunt, flat surcharge — and what this gives countries of the Global South. Economic columns in Forbes Brasil refer to calculations by the independent platform Global Trade Alert, showing that Brazil is the main beneficiary of the reforms: the average tariff rate for Brazilian exports to the US falls by 13.6 percentage points, while for China it drops by 7.1, and for European allies, by contrast, it rises. In the Forbes Brasil piece "Pré-mercado: Brasil ganha com tarifas, mas momento é de turbulência" the author emphasizes that the country gains a short-term advantage in access to the US market, but in return faces greater overall instability and high risks for the dollar and US government debt, as evidenced by reactions in currency and debt markets.
The more politicized outlet Brasil de Fato focuses on how Trump bypassed the Supreme Court ruling. After the Court declared a significant portion of his previous "tariff" enacted under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) illegal, Trump that same weekend first announced a 10-percent and then a 15-percent global surcharge using a different provision — Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. In the note "Trump eleva tarifa global para 15% e bate no limite permitido por lei dos EUA" it is emphasized that he is "going to the ceiling" allowed by law, and his post on Truth Social, where Trump again accuses many countries of "years of stealing from the US," illustrates for Brazilian readers the style of American policy: aggressive, personalized, aimed at the domestic electorate. Columnists in center-left outlets see a paradox: a president who positions himself as a defender of the American working class makes a decision that, according to global economists, is in the short term more advantageous to China and Brazil than to European allies and even parts of American industry, as noted in English-language analysis by the Financial Times and reinterpreted in the Brazilian press.
In France the same tariff story is read quite differently. For Paris it is another link in the chain of "Trumpization" of transatlantic relations. French and European commentators stress that the new 15-percent global rate destroys the point of the laborious US‑EU trade agreement of 2025: effectively, the EU loses most of the zero or reduced tariffs that had been the object of long negotiations. In the influential Spanish newspaper El País, whose line French analysts closely follow, Spain's economy minister Carlos Cuerpo says that although the US Supreme Court reduced average tariffs for many European goods (from 14.4% to 12.6%), this relief is temporary and already called into question by the new 10- and 15-percent surcharges that threaten to return escalation. French centrist and left‑liberal media see in this an echo of the Trump-1 era: the US as an "unreliable partner," changing rules unilaterally and calling into question the supremacy of international agreements.
Against this background, France's attitude toward the US is not reduced to Trump as an individual but is fragmented: on the one hand — the strategic necessity of cooperation on Ukraine, nuclear control, China and the Middle East; on the other — a growing need to "insure" against American zigzags by strengthening European autonomy, including in defense and industrial policy. Often American domestic dynamics are interpreted in France as a symptom of a crisis of the West itself. In a recent Time France piece summarizing the year after Trump's return to power and his recent message about a "historical redress," the gap is emphasized between his triumphant tone and persistent domestic discontent recorded by sociologists. For the French reader this contrasts with the image of America in the Obama years — then Washington's internal and external messaging seemed more coordinated.
A separate but increasingly noticeable thread in the French discussion about America is the role of the US as an "AI empire." In an opinion column in DCmag under the telling headline "Les Big Tech et l’IA, plus fortes que les Etats en 2026," commentator Yves Granmontant writes that the four largest American tech corporations — Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google) and Meta — will spend in 2026 on the AI race about 0.6% of US GDP, that is, more than the legendary Apollo program. The author concludes that these private giants are already acting not as companies but as quasi-states, possessing their own foreign-policy and geo-economic interests, and that European states are increasingly forced to react to what happens in Seattle and Silicon Valley the way they once reacted to White House decisions. For France this raises the question of digital sovereignty and the fate of European regulatory initiatives like the AI Act in the face of the dominance of American platforms.
In Brazil the AI agenda linked to the US is noticeably less emotional than in Europe: local analysts more often view American AI as a potential resource to boost productivity and modernize the economy. But here too the motif of asymmetry sometimes appears: in debates about platform regulation and data protection the US figures as the center of decision-making that changes the rules of the game for the Global South without asking for its consent.
Returning to Ukraine, this is perhaps where the most complex emotional knot in attitudes toward the US appears. For Ukrainian society America remains the main ally, without which there would be neither sustained military support nor sanctions pressure on Russia nor prospects for any acceptable peace agreement. At the same time fear is growing that Washington, pursuing its own timelines and domestic political interests, may try to "push" a compromise that Ukrainian society will not accept. The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology recorded in December 2025 that 75% of Ukrainians oppose ceding the remaining part of Donbas even as part of a peace settlement; at the same time, according to Gallup polling in July 2025, 69% of respondents in the country favored negotiations and only 24% favored continuing the war until victory. This internal dilemma — the desire for peace without capitulation — American commentators describe in articles translated into Russian, for example in InoSMI in the text "The Dilemma of Ukraine," but inside Ukraine it is also colored by experiences of corruption scandals and elite disappointment, against which any signals from Washington about the "need for realism" are received nervously.
The French and broader European lens on Ukraine and the US is tinged with an idea of "fatigue" — among both societies and elites. On the one hand, official statements from Paris and Berlin continue to emphasize that the US is indispensable to deterring Russia. On the other — voices questioning what will happen if the mood or priorities in Washington change in a year or two are getting louder. Against this backdrop the idea of European "strategic autonomy," promoted by Emmanuel Macron, stops being abstract philosophy and becomes a practical response to American unpredictability.
Brazil, unlike Europe, looks at the US‑Ukraine agenda more distantly. For the Lula administration, the key issues in dealings with the US remain climate, trade and reforming global institutions. Here the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is perceived with greater irritation than even the tariff war: for a country claiming a role as a climate leader thanks to the Amazon, this looks like a step backward at a moment when the Global South insists on a fair green transition. But, as the Brazilian magazine Veja points out in "Nova tarifa global de Trump beneficia o Brasil, mas não dá para contar com ela," Brazil pragmatically uses any windows of opportunity — even if they open as a result of internal American legal battles between Trump and the Supreme Court.
Across this diversity of national perspectives several common themes emerge. The first is distrust in the predictability of American policy. For Ukraine it is the fear of being "sold out" for the sake of geopolitical balance; for France — the worry that any new agreement (on trade, climate or security) can be revised by a single Washington tweet; for Brazil — the understanding that tariff windows advantageous today can snap shut in 150 days, as the law requires, or even sooner if US political circumstances change.
The second common theme is the perception of the US as a country where private and state power are intertwined to indistinguishability. In France this is a discussion about Big Tech and AI, in Ukraine — about the role of the American military‑industrial complex and its influence on the protraction of war, in Brazil — about how decisions by the Fed, rating agencies and tech corporations from California affect currencies and Global South markets no less than official White House statements.
And finally, a third theme — the duality of attitudes toward America: a combination of criticism and dependence. Ukrainian experts, French columnists and Brazilian economists can sharply criticize Trump's unilateral moves, but all of them acknowledge that without the US — its markets, its military and technological power, its political weight — neither the war, nor the climate crisis, nor global trade can be reorganized. That is the paradox of the current moment: the more the world is outraged by "American unpredictability," the clearer it becomes how much it still depends on decisions made in Washington and in Silicon Valley.
