Brazil’s Lula Carves Out Independent Foreign Policy

 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.”

 

China’s Growing Sway in the Middle East

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

China’s mediation between archrivals Saudi Arabia and Iran in March surprised the world. The fact that representatives of these archrivals on the Persian Gulf even agreed to resume diplomatic relations on March 10 caused quite a stir.

The agreement between the regional rivals to reopen embassies after a seven-year hiatus was brokered in secret by China. It raised questions over whether Riyadh had lost trust in Washington as a defender of its security and showed waning American influence in the region.

The Chinese managed to do what no one else, including the United States, had done and this has added a new dimension to China’s role in the Middle East. It was noteworthy because of Beijing’s leading role, and Washington’s absence, in the diplomacy that led to it.

Riyadh was angry with the U.S. It had expected an American response to an attack on Saudi oil facilities in September 2019, carried out by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. When none was forthcoming, the kingdom reassessed its view that it could depend on Washington, making direct diplomacy with Tehran more attractive.

Beijing was able to step in because they had the relationship and the leverage with both sides to try and accomplish this. The U. S. is no longer the indispensable power in the region and the only country strong enough to broker peace deals. China has claimed a share of that.

A key reason why many of these countries have a benign view of China is “because they have not seen China conduct itself in a way that would be threatening to them, or that has the potential of being threatening,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, told Al Jazeera April 25.

China is also not associated with a particular cause, like Washington’s close relationship with Israel, and has no history of punitive action, whether through military action or sanctions, in the region.

At the beginning of last December, China’s president, Xi Jinping, had been welcomed at the first ever Arab-Chinese summit in Riyadh. He pledged that he would use Beijing’s influence with Iran to close a deal with the Saudis. That meeting dispelled the impression that China was only interested in doing business in the Gulf. After all, a significant part of China’s energy supply depends on stable conditions in the Gulf region.

China is by far the most important trading partner for both Iran and Saudi Arabia and is the biggest buyer of oil from the two nations. In recent years, it has further cemented these relationships, signing a 25-year cooperation deal with Iran in 2021 and a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement with Saudi Arabia in 2022.

In other parts of the Middle East, too, trade with China is three times greater than trade with the United States. China invested more than $273 billion in the region between 2005 and 2022. It also buys oil from Iraq, gas from Qatar, and it exports weapons to Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It is helping Egypt build its new capital outside Cairo and has constructed the metro rail network in Mecca. The Belt and Road initiative, China's flagship global infrastructure project that started in 2013, has also allowed Beijing to expand its influence across the region.

More evidence of the closer relationship between the Chinese and Saudis came recently when King Salman bin Abdulaziz on March 29 authorized the nation’s bid to become a partner in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a Eurasian bloc including China, India, Iran, Russia and a number of central Asian states. It is dedicated to fostering multilateral cooperation in the realms of security, economy and politics.

Saudi Arabia’s ascension to the SCO, along with potential fields of cooperation between Iran and Saudi Arabia including on transportation, communication and geopolitical issues, may have already been discussed in Beijing during the discussions on normalising Tehran-Riyadh ties.

All members seeking admission to the organisation must not be hostile to existing members and maintain active relations with them. Saudi Arabia’s membership enhances energy accessibility for SCO members, including China. It also allows the SCO to get involved with regional security in the Middle East.

Another SCO objective is the establishment of a financial system independent of western financial arrangements. Currently, close to all major financial transactions, including in energy markets, are denominated in dollars. The dollar accounted for 96 per cent of world trade in recent decades, while the Chinese yuan came in at two per cent in 2022. After all, China, Russia and Iran all have an interest in working around U.S. sanctions and the dollar.

So the Middle East, so long a zone of confrontation, is becoming a balancing game. These countries are repositioning themselves in view of the current political climate, especially since the outbreak of the Ukraine war.

Saudi Arabia is newly friendly with China and Iran and is now balancing its security by playing off the U. S. against China. The United Arab Emirates is courting China, too, but it is also maintaining its defence relationship with Washington.

If this becomes the new norm, in which China is a peacemaker, it will negatively impact America’s global influence and help China portray itself as a stabilizing force in the world.

 

As Israel Turns 75, What Next?

 Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

Each year, the Israel Democracy Index takes the public pulse by conducting research based on the findings of a survey of a representative sample of the population.

Its most recent non-partisan report found that up to 75 per cent of Israeli Jews aged 18 to 34 identify as right-wing -- a trend, the report said, that has developed over the last decade. In addition, young people increasingly identify as being religious, or are being born into “ultra-Orthodox” families which tend to be more conservative.

That was in part reflected in last year’s national election, when a far-right alliance led by the Likud Party took power. Their leaders are now ministers in the coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A planned judicial reform announced by the government in January has led to deep divisions and the largest sustained mass demonstrations in the country’s history. Over the past four months, the gap in society between opponents and supporters of the controversial plan has been widening. The former say the overhaul would threaten Israel’s democracy, while the latter say it is necessary to curb what they describe as the country’s overly powerful Supreme Court.

But this is only a manifestation of far deeper divisions. Following the Nov. 1, 2022, elections, this latent political showdown finally erupted. Even Independence Day celebrations have been marred by political protests against the Netanyahu government. Has Israel reached a breaking point as it enters its 75th year?

The anger of Israel’s secular and liberal voters -- and the elites who make up the legal, academic, business, security, and media establishments -- is aimed at the people who voted Netanyahu back into office. Just below the surface is the contempt a large portion of the Israeli population feels for their compatriots who identify as nationalists and religious, as well as those of Mizrachi background, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who are severely under-represented among these elites. These Israelis feel that they’ve been left behind, locked out of the structures of Israeli success.

The left’s conception of Israel is rooted in the purely secular vision that animated the Labour Zionists and other left-wingers who ruled the country without challenge in the Jewish state’s first three decades. The Israel of the nationalist right and the religious parties, whose voters make up about half of the country and a clear majority of its Jewish population, is a country that the secularists don’t like. They seem to be saying that Israel won’t be a legitimate state if its democratic system continues to produce majorities for the right.

The fundamental cause of the decline of the left lies in demography. It was pinpointed by then-President Reuven Rivlin in a speech to the Annual Herzliya Conference in 2015 in which he said that “Israeli society is undergoing a far-reaching transformation,” in which it was becoming composed of four “tribes” of roughly equal strength: secular Jews, national religious Jews, “Ultra-Orthodox” Haredim, and Israel’s Arabs, all with entirely different outlooks “regarding the basic values and desired character” of the state.

The court reform crisis breaks down along those lines. The Israel Democracy Institute report shows that while there is a small but stable majority against the reform, 84 per cent of the left trusts the court, but only 26 per cent of the right does; and while 63 per cent of secular Jews trust the court, just six per cent of the ultra-Orthodox do.

The academic and journalist Avishay Ben Haim has suggested in various venues that Israel’s defining political struggle isn’t between left or right, or even the religious and the secular, but between representatives of what he has called the First and the Second Israel.

In Ben Haim’s analysis, the First Israel comprises the country’s traditional elites, the largely socialist and largely Ashkenazi milieu -- Jews of European origin -- that presided over Israel’s coming into being, while the Second Israel includes Israel’s Mizrachi Jews and its growing Orthodox population. While the two Israels might coexist uneasily within the same body politic, they are in fact fundamentally different and opposing entities.

The First Israel, he asserts, measures success by how closely it resembled the West, which means celebrating everything from big IPOs to Netflix deals. The Second Israel, realizing it is very much a product of the East, is more focused on family, tradition, and nation. For the First Israel, Jewish values are tolerable only as long as they don’t interfere with the dictates of cosmopolitanism; for the Second Israel, democracy is just another name for the sort of compromises that Judaism needs to generate, but it should never supplant or minimize it.

The current crisis presents a historic opportunity to refashion the Jewish state in a way that embraces the original aims of the founding: protecting both democratic rights and freedoms and also the unique Jewish character of the state.

If Israel is to become a more stable democracy, it must, as former President Rivlin implied, reform its political system so that all its tribes feel at home in the state. It must move from being a state in which a majority can do almost whatever it likes to one in which there is real partnership between the various groupings.