Flávio, Flávio’s first son, has just made his international debut. The stage was the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting in Dallas, Texas. , said revealing things, in addition to parading himself as his father’s political heir. He stated that his agenda belongs to those who see the world as a battleground between conservatism and “globalism”, a term under which the extreme right lumps together “internationalized elites”, “environmentalism” and “identity movements”, blamed for the dissolution of the family and its traditional values. All ideas from the extremist group already trumpeted in 2019 by Ernesto Araújo — the chancellor famous for bringing Brazilian foreign policy to ridicule.
Flávio promised, if victorious in October, unconditional alignment with the government in its feud with China — that is, 100% faithful to the erratic and destructive policy of . He justified the strategic importance of this submission by the possibility of giving the northern power unrestricted access to Brazilian rare earths and critical minerals, freeing it from dependence on Chinese imports.
One has to ask whether this agenda suits Brazil, which occupies an intermediate position in the international hierarchy. In fact, the country’s challenges are different and much more complex. It is about dealing with two major global transformations. The first affects the way power will be distributed with the end of the so-called unipolar order, characterized by the undisputed predominance of the United States. A new situation in which China gains increasing global prominence and in which the space of other nations with some power resources — including Brazil — expands, leading to the multiplication of hubs. The so-called multipolar systems, as we know, favor the formation of changing coalitions and alliances between nations. Which ones to participate in and under what conditions is a matter that requires a considered assessment of national interests at each moment, never unconditional alignment.
The second challenge for Brazilian foreign policy arises from the unprecedented crisis of the system of rules that had been governing relations between States since the end of the Second World War, commonly called the international liberal order or rules-based order. Its hard core is, on the one hand, the multilateral institutions that make up the United Nations family, designed to guarantee peace, development and international cooperation and, on the other, those established by the 1944 Bretton Woods agreements that regulate economic relations in a broad sense. The crisis is not new, but it has been exacerbated by the angry attacks of Trumpism.
By creating spaces for coalitions and incentives for bargaining, the multilateral environment is more favorable to middle-power countries than the arena of bilateral relations, where resource asymmetries directly affect results. For no other reason, Brazil has always invested in multilateralism; now you need to think about strategies to deal with the system crisis.
There are no easy answers to such profound changes. Brazilian diplomacy gropes and experiments. In Dallas, the Bolsonaro pre-candidate seemed to live in another world.
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