Two important statements went unnoticed in the national press, submerged in the endless developments and descriptions of each chess move in the presidential election. On January 20, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke at the World Economic Forum. Eight days later, it was time to speak at the opening of the Caribbean, in Panama. Both dealt with the challenges involved in the global disorder produced by the unbridled arrogance of .
Carney was adamant: the world is not going through a transition, but a rupture in the international order. The great power does not consider itself subject to any restrictions imposed by previously agreed rules.
According to him, this is not a crisis resulting from globalization itself, but from the fact that the US “has begun to use economic integration as a weapon, tariffs as levers of power, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” In other words, the Trumpist White House has exacerbated the use of globalization infrastructure as an instrument of power and aggression, a trend already observed by North American political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman in the book “” (the underground empire: how America instrumentalized the world economy), still unpublished in Portuguese.
Having enumerated the measures he was taking to increase his strategic autonomy, the prime minister recognized the limits and dangers of the endeavor: “A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.” He ended up placing in the joint action of the so-called middle powers, among which he included his own country — and we could include ours —, the hope of stopping the use of brute force and the effects of the raw rivalry between the great powers, in order to build a more cooperative and resilient world.
In a way, President Lula’s speech followed the same pattern. After listing the actions that would make the country less vulnerable to international uncertainties, he emphasized the need to seek what can support concerted regional action and to establish positive partnerships within and outside the region. He spoke about respecting the plurality of options and overcoming ideological differences.
Words are words; risk being lost over time. But, in this case, they seem to announce a gentle change in the government’s international strategy, which has privileged South-South coalitions, at the global level, and relations with ideologically close countries, at the regional level. The effort to conclude the agreement – and the nods to recently elected right-wing presidents in Chile and Bolivia are other signs of the correction of course. They attest to the government’s political sense and the ingrained pragmatism of our foreign policy.
Mark Carney’s speech indicates that understandings with northern democracies, in defense of civilized rules of international coexistence, are also possible.
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