As the manufactured crisis rumbles along with Iran, now ensnaring the United Kingdom, Washington policymakers are increasingly focused on another long-term threat: China. Last week, The New York Times reported that Democrats and Republicans have united on a new red scare in Washington. Pete Buttigieg has described China producing an “international expansion of authoritarian capitalism.” Elizabeth Warren has said that China has “weaponized its economy.” John Bolton has said that China and the United States’ conflict has elements of “Clash of Civilizations.”

China’s treatment of the Uighur minority in Xinjiang deserves both concern and strong advocacy from the highest rungs of the government. But the current focus on China as an existential threat is mostly notable for how it displaces the true existential threat to the United States and the world, climate change, in guiding our national security framework. And an appropriate level of attention to climate change as an urgent security concern would require the U.S. to reorder its priorities. While China is a top and growing greenhouse-gas emitter, we should be paying more attention to what is happening in our own hemisphere. In particular, that means addressing the more immediate danger that we are facing from a nominal state partner and President Trump ally: Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and its accelerating deforestation of the Amazon.

Bolsonaro, who has been referred to as the “Trump of the Tropics” and been celebrated by The Wall Street Journal, is an extreme reactionary who longs for the days of the Brazilian junta. Posing a danger to a fragile democracy and human rights in Brazil cannot be overstated; he has also cheered Wall Street in his choice of economic adviser, Paulo Guedes, a Milton Friedman–tutored University of Chicago graduate. Guedes, it is believed, could help open the a resource-rich but economically protected developing economy to financialization, selling off public assets such as Petrobras, the state oil company, once they purge the company of the past government. Combining this with Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo, who has called climate change “a plot by cultural Marxists” to stifle growth, and an agricultural minister who is the former head of the agribusiness lobby and intends to open up native land to farming, Bolsonaro’s regime is a direct threat to the Amazon rainforest.

The Amazon is the largest forested area in the world, one of the most biodiverse places on earth, and an enormous carbon sink for the atmosphere. Deforestation for agricultural purposes has been a concern for the last half-century, as an area the size of Texas has been slashed and burned. But what many policymakers may not be aware of is that if another fifth of the Amazon were to be destroyed for farmland or development, it could trigger something called a “dieback” where the forest would collapse in on itself, creating a carbon bomb released in the atmosphere. It would release the equivalent of 140 years of human activity.

Even the European Union, traditionally more enlightened than the U.S. in terms of incorporating climate change into policy, doesn’t seem to be taking this threat seriously. Last month, the European Union reached a trade deal with the South American trade bloc, Mercosur, that would open up European markets to Brazilian agribusiness. Under the deal, Brazil committed to environmental targets, echoing the previous administrations’ commitments to the Paris climate accord. But it is clear from both satellite data and governmental action that Bolsonaro is ignoring any environmental regulations. Not only should this revelation kill the trade deal ratification, it should caution policymakers that business as usual is no longer an option when dealing with Brazil.