Some world leaders butter up Trump. Others welcome the fight.

The past week offered a snapshot of the two dynamics. Last Monday, in a naked show of flattery, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proffered a letter he sent to the Nobel committee nominating Trump for the peace prize. Netanyahu — who is trying to keep his right-wing coalition government intact amid international pressure for Israel to end its campaign in Gaza and an ongoing trial over Netanyahu’s alleged corruption at home — needs Trump on his side. And he knows, like other world leaders, that if you want to win favors at the White House, just talk about the Nobel Prize.

Pakistan’s army chief first nominated Trump in June, saying that the United States’ intervention in a flare-up between Pakistan and India was instrumental to world peace (the Indian government maintains that the U.S. played no mediating role whatsoever in easing the crisis). Then, in the wake of Washington brokering a deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda over a ruinous insurgency taking place within the former, Trump bemoaned on social media how this diplomatic effort would still not win him the award he covets.

Trump has talked about his eligibility for the Nobel Prize since at least 2019, in his first term. A slew of prominent world leaders, from the late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe to the now-jailed ex-Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan, have been enlisted in conversations about Trump’s deserving the honor. That job fell this past week to Gabonese President Brice Oligui Nguema and Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, who both backed Trump for the prize in a somewhat cringe-inducing meeting in front of cameras at the White House.

“I didn’t know I’d be treated this nicely,” Trump said in response. “We could do this all day long.”

The other approach was taken by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In a wave of new tariff threats last week, Trump targeted Brazil with a hefty 50 percent import levy. He made no secret that his motivations were less economic than political, noting that he opposed the ongoing prosecution of former far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (a close Trump ally) on charges of plotting to retain power through military force following his 2022 electoral loss to Lula.

Instead of acquiescing or attempting to placate the White House — as Lula’s leftist Colombian counterpart, President Gustavo Petro, did in an early standoff with Trump at the end of January — the Brazilian leader is standing up to the U.S. president. “If he charges 50 from us, we will charge 50 from them,” Lula said in a Thursday broadcast interview. “Respect is good. I like to offer mine, and I like to receive it.”

As my colleagues Terrence McCoy and Marina Dias reported, the optics of the moment may be welcome in Brasília, where Lula and left-leaning allies face a tough election in 2026. “Lula now has a clear foe and a potent line of attack against Bolsonaro, or whoever takes on his political mantle in next year’s presidential election — able to tar them as being aligned with a hostile foreign power,” my colleagues wrote.

“Now you will have to decide whether you are on Trump’s side or Brazil’s side,” left-wing lawmaker Guilherme Boulos said in a speech. “That Trump tax now has a name … it is the Bolsonaro tax.”

“They made politics out of this, and we’re going to play the game,” a Lula aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to The Washington Post to explain the president’s thinking, told them. “He won’t make threats or fall into provocation, but his responses will be firm and bold.”

Trump has been an electoral gift to liberal or left-leaning politicians elsewhere. He upended Canada’s election campaign with his aggressive trade war, allowing the Liberals in Ottawa to extend their tenure in power and cratering the prospects of Conservative challenger Pierre Poilievre, who just seven months ago was widely believed to be Canada’s prime minister-in-waiting, but whose ideological proximity to Trump doomed his political fortunes.

A similar phenomenon followed in Australia, whose Labor government tarred right-wing challenger Peter Dutton as a would-be Trump. “The Trump tariff decisions that were seen as mad by Australians, that really accelerated the process of people looking at Dutton, and at Trump, and going, ‘No,’” Chris Wallace, a professor of political history at the University of Canberra, told the New York Times. “It’s a victory for sensible, centrist politics.”

Of course, not all leaders can afford confrontation with the U.S., which is why so many have tried to take an awkward middle path with a president who sees geopolitics often in stark, transactional terms. “Foreign leaders who have tried to confront him have not come out happy, and so there seems to be a competition to see how effectively they can flatter him,” Jon Alterman, chair of global security and geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Politico.

It explains, as critics never cease to point out, why Trump is close to petro-rich Arab monarchies, whose leaders are happy to support Trump’s family businesses and lavish Trump with gifts. But some governments are struggling to balance keeping the U.S. close while assuaging domestic public opinion. The clearest example of this is the plight of Japan, whose Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba was the first Asian leader to call on Trump at the White House but has failed to stave off damaging tariff threats ahead of tough parliamentary elections this month.

“They’re coming to a very hard realization that Japan is not special enough to Trump,” Mireya Solís, director of the Center for Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, told my colleagues. “At the end of the day, when Trump sees deficits, he’s not thinking, ‘This is my close security partner.’ He sees deficits.”