Brazil’s Foreign Policy Awakens: Is the United States ready? Is Brazil ready?
DEVELOPMENTS
Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, the former union leader turned center-left president of Brazil, left power on New Year’s Day after 8 years in office, his approval ratings over 80 percent. Many officials who served under the popular president will stay on in the government of Lula’s handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, his former chief of staff and the country’s first woman president.
Among those staying is Defense Minister Nelson Jobim, who has presided over a robust increase in the country’s military expenditures. In the past few months Jobim has issued brash warnings to the powers of North America and Europe — warnings that would have sounded laughable coming from a pre-Lula Brazil. “A NATO presence in the South Atlantic would be inappropriate,” said Jobim in September, adding on an October trip to Washington that Brazil considered the Atlantic near its coast to be its “Blue Amazon,” off-limits to foreign navies.
The feisty words from President Lula’s — and now President Rousseff’s — defense minister are emblematic of a Brazilian foreign policy that is suddenly confident, active, independent, and even pugnacious – a big change that departs from past precedent.
BACKGROUND
Until very recently, Brazil’s foreign policy could have been described as “sleepy.” Though Latin America’s largest country — its population is approaching 200 million — Brazil spent the twentieth century looking inward. It developed a professional diplomatic corps, but was consumed by domestic concerns during decades of dictatorships, autarkic development policies and severe economic crises. Brazil effectively ceded regional dominance to the United States, playing only a small role in the Organization of American States (OAS), or even in resolving regional crises. As late as 2000, Brazil avoided getting involved in efforts to end the armed conflict in neighboring Colombia, and kept its distance from the U.S.-aided “Plan Colombia” counter-drug plan.
A decade later, Brazil is inward-looking no longer. Among many other initiatives, it is playing a key role in efforts to free hostages held by Colombia’s FARC guerrilla groups. Though now leaving, longtime Foreign Minister Celso Amorim left a deep imprint on the country’s foreign relations. Under his guidance, Brazil has pursued a vision of a “multi-polar” world led by several regional powers — like Brazil — instead of one or two global superpowers. Brazil has privileged its “south-south” relationships with developing nations on all continents, especially within its immediate neighborhood.
Brazil gets the credit for founding, in 2006, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), a South America-only diplomatic forum that would take on many of the political and peace-building functions currently associated with the OAS. Though UNASUR as yet has no permanent secretariat, and is hampered by the difficulty of reaching consensus on key decisions, it has played an important role in defusing crises, – including this year’s police uprising in Ecuador – while its South American Defense Council has made strides toward improved confidence-building and transparency in a continent where arms transfers are increasing. Brazil also deftly employed UNASUR as a check on the regional political ambitions of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
Beyond South America, the Lula government tried to make a mark on the world stage by brokering a May 2010 nuclear deal with Iran. Lula was convinced that, contrary to the U.S. and European view, Iran’s ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon could best be checked not by international sanctions but by dialogue and negotiation. Together with Turkey, Brazil convinced Iran to transfer some of its enriched uranium to Turkey. The deal enraged the Obama administration, which viewed it as enabling Iran to employ a delaying tactic to avoid United Nations (U.N.) sanctions, while continuing to develop a weapon capability. The deal, however, ultimately fell through, and remains a sore point in U.S.-Brazilian relations.
The Iran negotiation was Brazil’s largest-ever foray into global diplomacy. While it cannot be considered a success, — and President Rousseff has been far more critical of Iran — we can expect Brazil to be still more diplomatically active over the next few years.
Brazil now has the world’s eighth-largest economy, and will soon overtake Italy to assume the number-seven spot. Meanwhile, U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere — while still great — is fading, as the Obama administration contends with wars and more immediate threats in the Middle East, and struggles to recover from the 2008 economic crash – a crisis that barely impacted Brazil.
If economic and military power confer prestige and influence, we can expect Brazil to have far more of both during Rousseff’s term. Analysts routinely use the term “BRIC” — first coined by a Goldman Sachs economist in 2001 — to describe Brazil, Russia, India and China as the world’s second tier of emerging economic powers. Brazil has meanwhile made an offshore petroleum discovery that could potentially lead it past Saudi Arabia as the world’s number-one oil supplier. Militarily, the country is making some ambitious arms purchases, including a new fleet of high-tech fighter planes and a French nuclear-powered submarine, while its Embraer aerospace company is making it an important weapons-selling country. Brazil’s newfound prestige will be on display when it hosts the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, while one of its diplomats’ chief goals in coming years will be to win Brazil a permanent seat on a possibly expanded U.N. Security Council.
ANALYSIS
Brazil’s rise as a regional, and possibly global, power may not be smooth. Its initiatives so far — particularly the Iran nuclear deal — have appeared to rely far more on “let’s see what happens” improvisation, than a well thought-out plan. And, while some may be pleased to see U.S. influence decline, many of Brazil’s neighbors may not exactly welcome — much less trust — a new self-interested hegemon in the region.
In the near term, Brazil must decide how committed it is to UNASUR. While countries like Argentina, Ecuador and Peru have strongly backed it lately, Brazil’s own participation in the organization it helped to create has shrunk notably. Brazil has been less interested in the arms-control and transparency direction that UNASUR’s South American Defense Council has taken, and Venezuela’s regional influence — a key motivator for Brazil’s push to found UNASUR — has declined from mid-2000s levels.
Venezuela remains both an important regional partner and rival, however, and while its relations with Brazil will remain cordial, it is likely that Ms. Rousseff will face an early challenge from Mr. Chávez. That challenge may take the form of a threat to a Brazilian economic interest in the region, as it did when, in 2006, Chávez encouraged Bolivian president Evo Morales to nationalize, among others, Brazilian-held energy facilities. Should a similar challenge come, the rest of the region will be closely watching the outcome.
Amid this power shift, the United States is likely to remain on the sidelines. The Obama administration is just too distracted to give much priority to Latin America and the Caribbean. For its part, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has shown little grasp of the region’s changing dynamic: key legislators’ inability to look beyond Cuba and Venezuela often makes them appear trapped in a cold-war time warp.
When it does look southward, however, the Obama administration must empower its diplomats to engage with Brazil on far more equal terms, on a range of challenges that can only be resolved through communication and cooperation: trade, energy, the environment, public security, organized crime, judicial reform, and transparency over arms transfers, among others. Meanwhile Washington would do well to encourage a more active Brazil to promote democracy and human rights, as it fills the vacuum that reduced U.S. power is leaving behind.
Adam Isacson is a senior associate for regional security policy at the Washington Office on Latin America.
