Are relations between the United States and Brazil about to become closer with the election of right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro? Many have speculated about a copycat, “Tropical Trump” who will lead Latin America’s largest country. Bolsonaro upended Brazil’s foreign policy establishment with pronouncements about opening the economy and “turning North;” moving the Brazilian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem; pushing back against the rising influence of China, Brazil’s largest trading partner; increasing business opportunities in the Amazon region; withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords; reevaluating the long-stalled Mercosur project; and implementing stronger measures to address the rapidly deteriorating situation in Venezuela.
Given the foreign policy reorientation Bolsonaro has outlined, it would seem that Brasília and Washington have deep sets of overlapping interests, including an elusive free trade agreement that would boost Brazil’s sluggish economy and address longstanding American frustrations with high Brazilian tariffs. Indeed, Trump and Bolsonaro have already declared their mutual admiration for one another in a post-election courtesy call. This was followed by a visit to the States and a meeting with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner by Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, a popular member of the Federal Chamber of Deputies, and a stopover in Brasília by John Bolton en route to the G20 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
While Bolsonaro’s reformist mandate offers plenty of space for a deeper U.S.-Brazil relationship, cooperation will not come as naturally as either Bolsonaro or Trump may think. The natural revival theory is rooted in the assumption that Bolsonaro is Trump’s Latin doppelgänger, and that camaraderie alone will create the proper conditions for realignment. No doubt, portrayals of Bolsonaro as the “Trump of Brazil” may be all the American president needs to know to be predisposed to like him. To leverage Bolsonaro’s stated desire for a closer relationship, however, Washington will have to proceed with deliberate action and consistent follow-up in a region it frequently neglects. Otherwise, Trump may find himself accepting Bolsonaro’s enthusiastic support while failing to navigate the historic pitfalls that have haunted the U.S.-Brazil relationship, a mistake he commits repeatedly—confusing personal chemistry (with friend and foe alike) for a good diplomatic outcome.
Wide Apart: US-Brazil Relations
U.S.-Brazil relations have long been cooperative but never particularly close. The partnership has suffered deep mistrust and significant differences of opinion, particularly between the U.S. State Department and the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (There have been occasional low points between presidents as well, such as when the Edward Snowden leaks revealed that the National Security Agency had listened to President Dilma Rousseff’s phone calls.) These difficulties have impeded trade, resulted in Brazil’s heavy reliance on multilateralism that purposefully excludes the U.S., and ushered in regional indulgence of dysfunctional states and Bolivarian autocrats in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.
On trade, Brazil is a relatively closed economy influenced by the ideology of “developmentalism,” which holds that companies linked to strategic sectors of the economy ought to be under state control. The military and the diplomatic corps, the two most public-facing institutions in Brazil, are the chief purveyors of this dirigisme. Brazil insists on a reduction in U.S. agricultural subsidies and bristles at U.S. attempts to protect intellectual property rights. And Brazil under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso was the main roadblock scuttling debate on the U.S.-backed Free Trade Area of the Americas—a dream whose defeat is still an open wound in some circles.
Bolsonaro claims that Brazil’s foreign policy displays ideological bias and a near obsession with multilateralism. The Foreign Ministry fiercely guards the country’s “independence”—little more than a veiled defiance of U.S. interests—and displays a bizarre reluctance to criticize repressive regimes like Iran, Cuba, and Russia. Brazil has attempted to weaken the OAS, instead favoring institutions like UNASUR and CELAC, which explicitly exclude the United States. The formation of the BRICS organization was the apogee of Brazil’s attempt to box out the U.S. in the Southern Hemisphere.
Lastly, Brazil has been reluctant to sound the warning bell against democratic backsliding in the region. On the contrary, it has cultivated close relations with many leftist regimes. For instance, in 2008 Lula claimed that “Chavez is the best President that Venezuela has had in the past 100 years.” Brazil’s misguided diplomatic initiative ensured Venezuela’s entrance into MERCOSUR, the regional trading block from which it is now suspended. It has also served as an important line of credit, extending subsidized loans via its national development bank to both Venezuela and Cuba.
Bolsonaro’s promise to turn away from Brazil’s traditional south-south orientation, reduce the leftist bias of the foreign ministry, and embrace win-win relations should arrive as a welcome breath of fresh air for U.S. policymakers. And in even better news, gridlock in Brazil’s Congress may lead Bolsonaro to invest more energy than expected conducting foreign policy, where the power of the Brazilian President is far less circumscribed. Bolsonaro may be obsessed with undoing the foreign policy legacy of the Workers Party—which instinctively views the United States with suspicion for its purported role in the 1964 coup—but fourteen years of uninterrupted control over the direction, policy formation, and training of the foreign ministry is not something Bolsonaro can easily uproot. The U.S. must work to prevent past tensions from muddying the budding Trump-Bolsonaro relationship, while ensuring that Bolsonaro’s stated positions translate into more than just rhetoric.
Outlining a Strategy
Because security—both domestic and international—was at the core of Bolsonaro’s electoral victory, it offers a natural entrée into a bilateral working relationship. Brazil sits in the crosshairs of a significant transnational organized crime (TNOC) zone—a fact that authorities were unwilling to admit under previous governments. Not only does Brazil consume and transit large volumes of cocaine, it also contends with terrorism networks operating in the tri-border area with Argentina and Paraguay. Most dramatically, the largest and most potent criminal organization in the country, the São Paulo-based Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC)—which police implicate in the September 6th assassination attempt on Bolsonaro—has expanded their reach in global organized crime. A U.S.-Brazil regional offensive against illegal drug trafficking and transnational organized crime, concentrated on both the tri-border area and other vulnerable parts of the country, would be an ambitious and mutually beneficial initiative.
Developing a common strategy on Venezuela is one of the biggest opportunities for a reinvigorated relationship with Brazil. As the recipient of nearly 100,000 Venezuelan refugees, Brazil has a strong interest in stanching the flow of refugees to Roraima, already one of the most impoverished states in the country. During the campaign, Bolsonaro made veiled threats of military intervention against Venezuela—all of which he walked back under pressure. With a little nudging from the Trump Administration, though, Brazil may be moved to provide logistical, financial, and moral support to the Venezuelan opposition, as well as impose unilateral sanctions aimed at unraveling the tangled web of organized crime sprouting forth from Venezuela’s current disorder.
Yet U.S.-Brazil cooperation should not end with the Venezuela crisis. The trade relationship, though more painstaking, also offers great upside potential. Bolsonaro is the first Brazilian president to understand that MERCOSUR is too unwieldy as a multilateral institution and too wedded to protectionism to negotiate successful trade deals. For instance, negotiations between MERCOSUR and the European Union over a free trade deal have been ongoing since 1999, with few breakthroughs. Bolsonaro understands that an economy the size of Brazil’s would do well to negotiate trade deals outside of the MERCOSUR framework—a special waiver Brazil will likely receive given the constellation of center-right governments currently comprising the bloc. Brazil’s incoming economy minister, Paulo Guedes, stated that MERCOSUR would not be a top priority, and it would behoove us to ensure he keeps his word.
Greater market integration with developed countries would diversify Brazil’s trading partners, deepen its role in global value chains, and play well for both Brazil’s economy and Trump’s domestic base. According to one study, a U.S.-Brazil free trade agreement would boost Brazilian GDP by $38 billion and U.S. GDP by $24 billion annually. The United States should piggyback on ongoing negotiations between Brazil and Chile, and join forces with Canada as it begins its own negotiations with Brazil. Trump has spoken about seeking a reduction in Brazil’s high tariffs and cost of doing business. Known colloquially as “custo Brasil,” Brazil’s tax system ranks 184th out of 190th in terms of complexity, according to the World Bank. Trump should endorse any movement away from protectionism in a country where we ran a $27 billion trade surplus in 2017. Magnifying the economic opening begun under President Michel Temer would also give us a chance to undercut China’s leading financial role in the region.
Even though the United States does not promise the same cash windfall, it ought to tap Bolsonaro’s strong anticommunist sentiment to prevent China from buying up more strategically important companies in the region, should Bolsonaro move forward with his plan to privatize state-owned companies in key sectors. Another excellent example is the Bi-Oceanic Central Railway Project, connecting Brazil to Peru via Bolivia and closely linked to investment from China’s One Belt One Road program. Because Brazil has the most Chinese debt of any country in the region other than Venezuela, whatever pressure it is able to apply would help the United States in its ongoing trade dispute with China, as China is unlikely to risk getting bogged down on yet another front.
In short, the to-do list in the U.S.-Brazil bilateral relationship is mighty long. Accordingly, it would be a colossal mistake to assume that bonhomie between leaders alone can carry the day. And yet, that is exactly what Trump has assumed time and again with the likes of China, North Korea, and even some of our European allies. With Bolsonaro’s strong mandate for reform in Brasília, the prospect for a renewed relationship with Brazil is looking better than ever. The most assured way to squander this historic opportunity would be to let Trump lapse into thinking his friendships can do all of the heavy lifting.