Brazil lacks a popular national project capable of sealing a strategic pact between sectors of the elite interested in the country’s reindustrialisation and popular sectors, mediated by a state capable of leading a sovereign development project, Marco Fernandes
writes. Still, it has a chance to resume a ‘proud and active’ foreign policy.
In an interview with Brazilian television, hours after the illegal and unprovoked US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, Brazil’s former foreign minister, former defence minister, and current special advisor to the president on international affairs, Celso Amorim, declared in an unusual, anguished tone: ‘The international order is over! Whether from the point of view of trade or from the point of view of peace and security. We will have to adapt to this, and it will not be easy.’
When he made this sombre reflection on live TV, Amorim did not imagine that Brazil would be one of the next victims of the ‘end of the international order’. Days after the criminal attack on Iran, in the first day of the Rio Summit, Trump threatened BRICS member countries with extra tariffs of 10% if they engaged in alleged ‘anti-American initiatives’ (without clarifying to what initiatives he was referring). Trump’s attack made headlines around the world for a summit whose importance had been questioned by the Western corporate media, which tends to underestimate the group, especially due to the absence of some of the main heads of state, such as Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Masoud Pezeshkian.
Two days after the summit ended, Trump turned his ‘tariff cannon’ on Brasilia. Although the US has had a trade surplus with Brazil of around US$ 410 billion over the last 15 years – which undermines the recurring argument that Washington is imposing tariffs to reverse trade deficits – Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian products.
At this stage, however, it is already clear that Trump is using tariffs to attack President Lula and the Supreme Court (STF), in a calculation that takes into account the 2026 presidential elections. Washington has also invoked the Magnitsky Act, which provides for sanctions against individuals linked to drug trafficking and terrorism, to punish some members of Brazil’s Supreme Court. The US president has outlined the main reasons for his attack on Brazil: he is demanding that Lula suspend the trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro, convicted for 27 years for organizing an attempted coup in January 2023 against the newly elected President Lula, as if the presidency had authority over the Supreme Court. Trump also accuses the STF of disrespecting the ‘freedom of expression’ of American companies and individuals, since the Brazilian judiciary has legitimately sought to regulate social media platforms in criminal cases. In both cases, Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes is leading the proceedings and became the main target of US sanctions. There are also rumors that Trump is seeking to target the main BRICS countries in order to weaken the group and might have his eye on the world’s second-largest rare earth reserves, located in Brazil. These attacks would therefore be aimed at opening negotiations with the Brazilian government on issues that have not yet been disclosed.
This is the most significant public attack by the US on Brazilian sovereignty, as it transcends the trade conflict and uses tariffs as a political weapon to interfere in the country’s political, judicial, and financial systems. In practice, Washington has imposed sanctions on Brazil. Unbelievably, the coordination of such attacks included the public participation of federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the former president, who fled to the US for fear of being prosecuted and has been meeting with Trump’s inner circle to conspire against his own country. This US manoeuvre called for a change in the course of Brazilian foreign policy and forced President Lula and Itamaraty to reposition themselves in the global geopolitical scenario.
Why has Brazil not yet returned to the center stage of geopolitics? How US destroyed Brazil’s regional strategy
Lula da Silva’s return to power in 2023 generated high expectations for a return to the boldness that characterised his foreign policy during his first two terms. Shortly after being elected in October 2022, Lula announced: ‘Brazil is back,’ meaning that we were back in the game of global politics. However, this has not been the case so far, for various reasons. First of all, we live an increasingly turbulent global scenario, with the escalation of Western attacks against China and Russia – through sanctions, media warfare and a hot war -, the US-backed genocide in Palestine, and a deep political polarization in Latin America and the Caribbean with the rise of the extreme right wing – strongly connected to Washington’s interests. A very different scenario from Lula’s and Dilma Rousseff’s terms (2003-2016).
The foreign policy of Lula’s third term was dubbed ‘active non-alignment’ and sought to mark an ‘equidistance’ between the two major global powers, the US and China. It has been characterised by 1) a defensive-reactive stance and cautious steps, 2) an inability – until now – to lead an effective reorganisation of the two main regional platforms (Unasur and CELAC) that Brasilia helped to create in the 2000s, 3) timid participation in BRICS, in which it had been a leading player in the early years of its existence, and 4) difficulty in proposing strategic partnerships that would bring economic and political benefits to Brazil.
The government’s biggest bet, until now, has been the Mercosur-European Union Free Trade Agreement, which numerous serious analysts in the country – such as Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr. — have already shown will benefit European industry more than the Mercosur economies, and above all, will undermine Brazil’s reindustrialisation efforts. In numerous public statements, the government has consistently emphasised the ‘geopolitical importance’ of this agreement, but it typically avoids discussing its economic nature, which is, to say the least, controversial. Even the Minister of Economy, Fernando Haddad, has already stated that he does not see any major economic advantages in the agreement.
There are a few other objective and subjective elements that explain the change in Brazil’s foreign policy under ‘Lula 3’. Let’s start with the subjective ones. Unlike the previous terms of Lula and Dilma Rousseff, in which the PT – inclined towards Latin American integration and the construction of the BRICS – had greater weight in the government’s direction, Lula’s current term has been constituted as a ‘broad front’ to defeat the far right in the 2022 elections, including centre-right parties with economic ties and ideological preferences for the US and Europe. In addition, President Lula no longer has two brilliant figures from his past foreign policy team: Marco Aurélio Garcia, special advisor on international relations to the presidency (the same position currently held by Celso Amorim) and Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães, former secretary-general of Itamaraty, both of whom recently passed away. Garcia had one important advantage: he was not an Itamaraty’s cadre, so he could do some moves as an “outsider”. He was the secretary for international relations of the Workers’ Party for a long time – fully trusted by Lula and Dilma – and carried with him a vast network of political relations, specially in Latin America. We still have Celso Amorim, a skilled negotiator and one of the architects of the BRICS formation, who is now a key protagonist not only of Brazilian foreign policy but also of the entire Global South. However, the ‘dream trio’, led by Foreign Minister Amorim in the past, is sorely missed in the construction of President Lula’s strategy and in its day-to-day operation.
What about the objective aspects of the changes in Lula 3’s foreign policy?
As the largest regional power, representing about 40% of the region’s economy, the priority of Brazilian foreign policy can only be the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean. For this reason, during the Lula and Dilma administrations, Brasília devoted a great deal of energy to coordinating UNASUR and CELAC, an alternative to the Organisation of American States, which has been controlled by Washington for decades and has served as a legitimising instrument for countless US-backed coups d’état. CELAC’s formation was facilitated by the ideological alignment of progressive governments during Latin America’s ‘pink wave’ in the 2000s. Left-leaning administrations in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Cuba formed a dominant political bloc. Their collective influence was strong enough to draw in countries with more conservative governments at the time, including Chile, Colombia, and Mexico.
But foreign policy is not made only with nice speeches and ideological affinities; it requires materiality. For this reason, Brazil has contributed significant resources to the policy of Latin American and Caribbean integration. We were responsible for a kind of ‘mini Belt and Road Initiative avant la lettre,’ with a methodology similar to the one that China successfully carried out years later. On the one hand, between 2007 and 2015, the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) was responsible for more than US$ 10 billion in financing for infrastructure projects in numerous countries in the region (Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Honduras, Costa Rica), as well as Angola, Ghana and Mozambique. On the other hand, ports, railways, airports, roads, gas pipelines, and subways were all built by large Brazilian construction companies. In this way, Brazil not only preached integration, but practised it, improving the region’s infrastructure while accumulating political capital and guaranteeing profits for its companies.
But it was precisely these construction companies, in addition to Petrobras, Brazil’s largest state-owned company, that were the main targets of Operation Car Wash, which investigated cases of corruption and caused a political earthquake in Brazil, resulting in the arrest of countless politicians and businesspeople, creating the conditions for the parliamentary coup against President Dilma Rousseff, the arrest of President Lula and his exclusion from the 2018 elections, for which he was the favourite. Under the pretext of fighting corruption – which no one can be against – and in coordination with the mainstream corporate media, Lava Jato, instead of merely punishing the directors and owners of Brazil’s mega-construction companies, decided to destroy those companies, which were strategic instruments for both the Brazilian economy and its foreign policy.
Now that the political tsunami has passed, and with numerous investigations still ongoing, it is fully documented that Lava Jato, under the leadership of then-judge and now-senator Sérgio Moro, was an instrument of lawfare, directed and supported by the FBI and the US Department of Justice, serving Washington’s imperialist interests.
Brazil was the target of one of the largest hybrid warfare operations in history, carried out by the Obama-Biden administration, which cost us dearly, both economically and politically. In politics, it paved the way for the rise of the far right and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, who is absolutely subservient to Washington’s interests, symbolised in the famous scene in which the former president saluted the American flag. Bolsonaro devastated the Brazilian state with his hyper-neoliberal policies, and Brazil became a dwarf in foreign policy. For Washington, mission accomplished. But it should be noted that it took years, and the hacking of a Telegram account belonging to the head of the Operation Car Wash prosecutors, for the US involvement to become evident. In this sense, the neocon Democratic Party’s foreign policy proved to be sophisticated and efficient, unlike the current Trumpist strategy, which makes no secret of its imperialist vocation.
Trump’s own goal and the turnaround in Brazilian foreign policy
Trump’s recent offensive against Brazil has completely changed the pieces on the Brazilian chessboard. The defense of national sovereignty and Brazilian institutions has become a point of honour for the government, and Lula has begun to make almost daily speeches confronting US aggression. In one of his strongest speeches, he stated that “Trump was elected to be president of the United States; he was not elected to be emperor of the world”. Few things make Lula more comfortable politically than an adversary to confront. Since then, his popularity, which had been slowly declining, has risen again, both in Brazil and around the world. He made the front page of the New York Times as ‘the man who is standing up to Donald Trump’. Brasília, which had been trying to maintain a certain ‘equidistance’ between the US and China and had preferred not to bet as heavily on BRICS as in the past, took a much more proactive stance and reapproached the group it helped found in 2009. BRICS seems to become a priority for the government once again. Lula made numerous phone calls to Xi, Putin, and Modi and organised a rare online summit of the group to discuss responses to the White House’s attacks.
Although Brazilian exports to the US currently account for only 12% of our international trade, they are still the largest destination for our manufactured goods and our largest source of FDI, with almost 30% of the total stock of investments. Trump reduced tariffs on approximately 700 products from 50% to 10%, including orange juice, cellulose, fertilisers, aircraft, and aircraft parts (from Embraer), as well as intermediate metallurgical products. According to government estimates, only about 36% of Brazilian exports will be affected by the maximum tariff. On the one hand, Brasília maintains its line of proposing negotiations with Washington. After the “chemistry” of Lula and Trump’s brief meeting at the UN, followed by numerous behind-the-scenes negotiations through formal and informal channels, the US president appears to have backed down and is expected to meet with Lula soon. In the internal dispute in Washington, the pragmatic businessman trusted by Trump, Richard Gellner, appears to have temporarily won the tug-of-war with the aggressive Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who views Lula as an ideological adversary. On the other hand, the order now is to accelerate the diversification of economic partnerships to reduce the influence of the US. As Celso Amorim recently said, ‘diversification is the new name for independence’. Brazil has increased its exports to China and is seeking to build closer ties with other BRICS partners.
At the end of October, Lula is expected to make an unprecedented state visit to Indonesia and then attend the ASEAN Summit (Malaysia) for the first time. A source who observed Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s state visit, which occurred two days after the Rio de Janeiro Summit, reported strong chemistry between the two leaders. This personal rapport could strengthen the partnership between Brazil and Indonesia — the world’s seventh and eighth largest economies by purchasing power parity, respectively. In recent weeks, Brazil has also announced important economic agreements with Mexico, the result of a visit by several ministers led by Vice President Geraldo Alckmin to the region’s second-largest economy, which has also been suffering attacks from the US. Lula has also been invited to India and is expected to visit Narendra Modi in February, marking an unprecedented rapprochement with New Delhi, which will hold the BRICS presidency next year. In fact, only India has been subjected to tariffs (or sanctions) and public attacks by US authorities as aggressive as those against Brazil for buying Russian oil (something that the EU, China and Turkey also do, without, however, being punished by the White House). The rapprochement between New Delhi and Beijing has been, so far, the most significant consequence of the US attacks on its historic South Asian partner.
In the current dynamics of the increasingly fierce geopolitical dispute, when Trump attacks other countries, he weakens the sectors of the local elite that are allied with the US and strengthens those whose interests are linked to China, Russia, or the BRICS. This is similar to what has happened in China (since 2017) and Russia (since 2014 and, even more so, since 2022), where pro-Western local sectors have been weakened by US aggression. Therefore, when Trump started the ‘Trade War’ and imposed the first sanctions against the Asian country’s high-tech sector (Huawei and ZTE) during his first term, he earned a nickname in China. This offensive demonstrated to the Chinese government and people that the US was no longer a reliable partner, but was becoming an adversary, and that it was therefore necessary to accelerate the country’s technological development, which could no longer depend on high-tech products from US companies, such as chips. The Chinese began to call him Chuan Jiàn Guó. Chuan is the Chinese pronunciation of Trump, Jiàn means ‘builder’, and Guó is ‘nation’. In other words, ‘Trump, builder of the nation’... Chinese!
Will the current attacks by the US president help to build the Brazilian nation, or even the BRICS? As Napoleon allegedly said, ‘You should not interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake’. However, Brazil’s challenges in resuming a ‘proud and active’ foreign policy are still enormous, as mentioned above. For example, it would be necessary to rebuild our capacity to finance – and build – infrastructure projects in the Latin America and the Caribbean. With such a political polarization in the region, the economic integration will have to play an even major role. President Lula has already sent a bill to Congress so that the BNDES can resume financing projects abroad. However, the once powerful Brazilian construction companies have not yet recovered, and now they will have to compete with their Chinese counterparts. Above all, we lack a popular national project capable of sealing a strategic pact between sectors of the elite interested in the country’s reindustrialisation and popular sectors, mediated by a state capable of leading a sovereign development project.
Ultimately, regardless of the outcome of any negotiations between Brazil and the US, President Lula’s powerful speech at the 80th UN General Assembly echoed a disturbing phrase around the world: “There [in Gaza], under tons of rubble, tens of thousands of innocent women and children lie buried. There, too, lie buried international humanitarian law and the myth of the ethical superiority of the West.” What foreign policy will Brazil (and the Global Majority) adopt in the face of this irrefutable truth? This is perhaps the most important geopolitical question of the 21st century.
