Making sense of United States–Brazil relations under Bolsonaro

Abstract

Political alignment with the United States became an essential aspect of Brazilian foreign policy once Jair Bolsonaro came to power in Brazil. While close ties to Washington had already been established since the interregnum period of the Temer government, far‐right ideological synergies between Bolsonaro and Donald Trump became more highly visible. A common anticommunism stance inter‐linked with antiglobalism reflected commonalities in regional politics and a pronounced strengthening of defense and security ties. Yet, Bolsonaro–Trump common worldviews did not spill over in Brazilian international economics. While political relations with the United States took on major importance, Brazil's investment and trade ties with China were maintained and even expanded. This article focuses on Brazil–United States relations during the Bolsonaro–Trump years. To make sense of this link, two elucidatory paths are drawn—a comparative historical overview that traces previous moments of bilateral ideological synergies to evaluate the exceptional character of Bolsonaro–Trump bilateralism; and contextualization within the process of redistribution of world power intertwined with the rise of China, which has deeply affected the leadership capacity of the United States.

Brazil’s Strategic Diplomacy Failures and Foreign Policy Underachievement under Bolsonaro

“…In sharp contrast to previous democratically elected presidents, he showed little interest in boosting Brazil's international status in multilateral forums (Buarque 2022) or in the Global South. Instead, he took a personalistic approach to aligning with the Trump administration, in marked contrast to Itamaraty's long-standing position of avoiding any 'automatic alignment' with the US (Herz 2022;Hirst and Valls Pereira 2022;Sá Guimarães and Silva 2021). His government's foreign-policy decisions were mostly targeted at impressing domestic audiences with little reference to Brazil's international commitments or its relations with international clients and partners.…”