Bolsonaro’s conviction earlier this month on coup-plotting charges captures both the strengths and the limits of Brazil’s democracy. Since the fall of the monarchy in 1889, Brazil has faced at least 15 coups or coup attempts. Until this month, no coup leader had ever been convicted. The country’s courts have thus shown they can hold the powerful accountable. The decision has led foreign observers to commend Brazil’s democratic resilience, but this is far from the end of the story. Legal avenues for Bolsonaro’s appeal remain open, and the case has exacerbated the country’s already deep polarization.

Brazil’s Supreme Court is meant to play the role of an institutional backstop, stepping in to check executive branch overreach when Congress would not. However, its efforts have not always been consistent. Even after Brazil transitioned back to democracy and a new constitution gave the court sweeping new powers in 1988, it often tried to avoid confrontation. Its justices appeared powerful on paper but were feckless in practice, hampered by infighting and opaque backroom maneuvering in the face of executive branch overreach. More recently, the court has sent mixed signals to the public that undermined its image as a neutral arbiter of the law.

Aware of the high court’s vulnerabilities, Bolsonaro tried to delegitimize it in the public eye from the moment he came to office. Yet the court, led by assertive and outspoken jurists like Alexandre de Moraes, proved determined to resist Bolsonaro’s illiberal project. The Supreme Court reinvented itself after Bolsonaro’s election, as its justices set aside personal rivalries to respond to the autocratic threat. They wielded their statutory tools more aggressively than in the past, sometimes stretching precedent. It remains to be seen whether the court can sustain its legitimacy in calmer times.

Far from easing the country’s divisions, Bolsonaro’s conviction could deepen them. For his supporters, the Supreme Court ruling risks turning him into a martyr, even as Bolsonaro and his allies pursue legal appeals and press for amnesty. Meanwhile, right-wing figures in the United States aligned with President Donald Trump are already portraying Bolsonaro as a political prisoner, raising the prospect of diplomatic friction, economic pressure or further sanctions like the ones that the State Department recently imposed on Moraes. The Supreme Court alone cannot ensure the health of Brazil’s democracy. That will depend on Congress and Brazil’s civil society taking on fair shares of the burden.

Detecting and defusing threats, whether from external adversaries, internal weaknesses or broader economic and technological trends, is at the heart of a robust national security posture for any country. But what if a government chooses to blind itself to seeing such threats? Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has reportedly eliminated both the Global Trends report and the Strategic Futures Group that compiles it. The Global Trends report was an effort to foresee medium- and long-term developments over a 20-year time horizon and assess their implications for U.S. national security. The elimination of Global Trends is just the latest example of the Trump administration's failure to think about or plan for the future.

Until recently, the U.S. government's solution to this dilemma was to seed the executive branch with units tasked to think about the long run. This began immediately after World War II, when George Kennan was appointed as the State Department's first director of policy planning. As the national security bureaucracy expanded, so did the number of strategic planning and foresight units. U.S. strategic foresight and planning efforts, and particularly Global Trends, have been the gold standard of such exercises around the world. Compared to its rivals, the U.S. held a decided advantage.

However, the Trump administration has decided to throw much of this planning and foresight architecture away. In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disestablished the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's internal think tank. The reasons why Gabbard eliminated future forecasting are particularly troubling, however. According to The New York Times, "Some of the warnings, most notably on climate change, had become politically inconvenient, according to former officials." An ODNI spokesperson explained that a draft of the 2025 Global Trends report was found to "propagate a political agenda that ran counter to all of the current president's national security priorities."

But the reality of climate change and the medium- to long-term threat it poses to U.S. national security are a matter of science and causality, not politics. To paraphrase Dwight Eisenhower's observation about military planning, forecasts are useless but forecasting is indispensable. Having units dedicated to strategic forecasting does not guarantee perfect foresight, but it does ensure that governments can be prepared to cope with unexpected or incipient problems. Long after Trump leaves office, the United States will be paying the price of his self-imposed strategic blindness.

A briefing by Freddy Deknatel on Israel’s war on Gaza and the inherent limitations of the Genocide Convention as a tool to hold states accountable for the “crime of crimes.”

A briefing by Candace Rondeaux on the Trump administration’s latest attempt at a thaw in relations with Belarus.

A briefing by Marisa Lourenço on a murky security deal that was recently signed by Rwanda and Mozambique, with big energy projects hanging in the balance.