By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
Countries in the Global South like Brazil, Egypt, India, and Pakistan are attempting to straddle allegiances in an era when the United States is no longer the world’s unchallenged superpower. They are positioning themselves as a diplomatic bridge between China, Russia and the United States.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, for example, has sought to stake out a leading global role for his country after a period of isolationism under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.
In a frantic few weeks recently he has made efforts to initiate peace talks on Ukraine, criticized the supremacy of the U.S. dollar, traveled to China, and hosted Russia’s foreign minister.
The left-leaning Brazilian leader has proposed a “world peace bloc” to mediate U.S., Russian and Chinese interests and broker an end to the fighting in Ukraine. He discussed the initiative with President Xi Jinping during his visit to China in April.
Lula also discussed trade, investment, and climate change along with the peace agreements. Trade between China and Brazil currently amounts to $150 billion annually, and Brazilian exports to China reached $89 billion in 2022.
Brazil exports more goods to China than anywhere else, including tens of billions of dollars worth of soybeans, beef, iron ore, poultry, pulp, sugar cane, cotton and crude oil. It also receives more Chinese investment than any other Latin American country.
Chinese businesses have projects in 23 of Brazil’s 26 states, spanning sectors like mining, agriculture, industry, telecommunications, finance and medicine. Leland Lazarus, associate director for national security at Florida International University, points out that China views Brazil as an important pillar in its engagement with Latin America.
Lula was a founding champion of the BRICS grouping of major non-western economies, bringing Brazil together with Russia, China, India and South Africa. The Brazilian president celebrated those connections on his trip to China, where he also called on the informal bloc to help wean the world off its dependence on the U.S. dollar.
Shortly after returning from Beijing, Lula hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Brasília. Moscow was “grateful to our Brazilian friends for their clear understanding of the genesis of the situation,” Lavrov told journalists. “The United States needs to stop encouraging war and start talking about peace,” Lula added in remarks to them.
Lula has angered NATO nations by suggesting they are prolonging the Ukraine conflict by supplying arms to Kyiv, and by proposing that, in order to achieve peace, Russia might surrender some of the territory it controls in Ukraine but be allowed to retain Crimea -- a prospect dismissed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Officials at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs were, not surprisingly, supportive of Lula’s plan, saying it would counteract the West’s “aggressor-victim” narrative about Ukraine. But John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, accused Lula of “parroting Russian and Chinese propaganda without looking at the facts.” In response, Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira said of Kirby, “I don’t know how or why he reached that conclusion but I do not agree at all.”
Lula’s initiative was taking shape at the same time his government welcomed two warships from Iran. They were part of Iran’s 86th Deployed Naval Group and concluded a week-long port call in Rio de Janeiro on March 4.
Washington assessed that Lula “likely approved the port call to bolster his reputation as a global mediator and burnish Brazil’s image as a neutral power” but said the visit didn’t necessarily indicate a major expansion of the two countries’ military relationship, despite Iranian hopes for such an outcome. It added that the governments of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela turned down Iran’s requests for parallel visits.
Ahead of the visit, some Brazilian navy officials had lobbied the United States to urge Lula’s government to deny the visit because they did not want Washington to view it as a “realignment” of Brazil’s external partnerships. Brazil’s navy downplayed the visit to the media but did hold a ceremony aboard the Dena, one of the Iranian ships.
Lula has much to gain by standing up to America. He can improve his credentials as a prominent leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, wresting that mantle away from his lesser regional competitors, such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, and Alberto Fernandez in Argentina.
He can stoke feelings of national pride and take advantage of resentment of the “northern empire,” as many refer to America. And he can forge a foreign policy of engagement with countries, like Iran, that seek to displace America’s influence in the region in favor of a multipolar world dominated by competing powers like Russia and China.
Lula’s moves amount less to an attempt to thwart the West than to advance Brazil’s national interests, as well as a commitment to alleviate poverty and hunger in the Global South.
Foreign policy will be a tool for building his own domestic political legitimacy. Lula is in the tradition of “nonaligned” Brazilian foreign policy, one which does not hew in the United States’ direction, but which also does not seek to act in antagonism to the West. “Brazil wants to reform world governance,” Celso Amorim, a senior adviser to the president, has indicated. “We would like to have a world governance which does not look like the present Security Council.”
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