Political polarization has contaminated relations between Brazil and the US, says expert

The interview below was originally published on the website Interesse Nacional, with which Sheet have partnership.

Bilateral relations between Brazil and the United States, which have always been marked by a focus on issues of importance to both countries, in recent years have become guided by politicization, emphasized by the personal relationship between the leaders of the two countries. For Britta Crandall, a professor of Latin American studies at Davidson College, this transformation began under Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro and has tainted high-level bilateral conversations ever since.

In an interview with Interests Nacional, Crandall analyzed the current scenario of relations between the two countries, explained that the US has traditionally neglected Brazil, but that the country has a relevant role in exchanges with the greatest power in the world.​

Author of books such as Hemispheric Giants: The Misunderstood History of US-Brazilian Relations and the recent Our Hemisphere?, the professor claims that the US wants Brazil to align itself with the West and with American interests in the current global division in NATO disputes with Russia and China.

According to her, the US government is also attentive to the situation of Brazilian democracy, and believes that it can have constructive relations with Brazil in the case of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory in this year’s elections.

How do you interpret Brazil’s hesitation in going to Summit of the Americas this year? What do you think this says about Brazil’s relations with the US? The relationship between Brazil and the US is obviously complex, and we need to take a historical view. Criticism of the US has traditionally been that there is benign neglect of the region. I believe that this neglect is due not to neglect, but to the fact that we have these two immense countries that really only need to interact when their priorities intersect. I strongly believe in the importance of Brazil’s behavior as an agent. It’s not just a US-led relationship. This dynamic is two-sided.

What’s different now is how politicized the relationship has become. It is driven at the highest level by the political dynamics between two leaders. Until now, the bilateral relationship has always been based on themes and issues that were relevant to both countries, such as human rights, environment, foreign trade. Since Trump and Bolsonaro, it has become an alignment of two right-wing populists. It was a personalistic bilateral response. Bolsonaro was aligned with Trump, not the US and vice versa.

How much does the issue of democracy and the threats against it in Brazil influence the country’s relationship with the United States? The narrative about Bolsonaro in the US from the beginning was that he was ‘Trump Trump’, and the fear has always been that Bolsonaro would follow Trump’s playbook and use it quite effectively against democracy. There is an expectation of accusations of electoral fraud or rejection of a negative result for him. With the October elections approaching, Bolsonaro is expected to rely more on this type of method to energize his base. So I think this is a real concern. If we have a situation where Bolsonaro says the election was stolen and starts to walk a similar path to Trump, it will negatively affect the bilateral relationship.

His work deals with a historical perspective, and when we talk about democracy in Brazil we always look back to 1964 and how the US supported the military coup. Should we take it seriously when Biden talks about defending democracy in Brazil? Does Biden Legitimately Support Democracy in Brazil? Undoubtedly. We are no longer in the Cold War. We are not in an environment where military regimes offer any benefit to US geopolitical interests.

The world is transforming and splitting into new spheres of influence, between China and more autocratic regimes versus the US and Western Europe. Where is Brazil in this division? The US benefits more if Brazil is in the democratic camp. The comparison with 1964 is difficult, because we couldn’t be in a more different situation than that.

If we think about the current Brazilian dispute between Lula and Bolsonaro, it is worth remembering that the US had a very productive relationship with Lula, despite the fact that he adopted a Brazilian foreign policy of non-alignment and independence from the US. This is much more preferable than Bolsonaro’s alignment with the US, which, again, was just an alignment with Trump and not an alignment with US policies. Looking skeptically at US interests, Lula is a much safer candidate in terms of alignment with these US geopolitical goals than Bolsonaro.

With the War in Ukraine, a lot has been said about the rearrangement of global power poles, and you mentioned this when talking about Brazil’s alignment with the US. But more broadly, how do you think Brazil and Latin America fit into this new global geopolitics? The designation that Trump bestowed on Brazil as a non-NATO-allied member is to some extent symbolic, but it continued to hold in the Biden administration and also has implications that are not insignificant in terms of the privileges Brazil would have in eligibility for cooperative research and development projects. . This is a way of including Brazil in this kind of US sphere of influence.

It’s hard to think about the long term because we’re up until the beginning of October in a period where we just don’t know what’s going to happen, because we have two very different scenarios about the future of the country depending on who wins the presidential elections. Brazil has played and can play an important role in the international response to the Russian conflict. If Lula were elected, it would pave the way for more conducive and harmonious relationships in the hemisphere.