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Lula’s balancing act
Following the defeat of right-wing nationalist Jair Bolsonaro to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last year, many in the West were hopeful that Latin America's most populous nation would become a likeminded partner in promoting democratic norms, upholding the rules-based order, and confronting authoritarian governments.
Yet in his first four months in office, Brazil's President Lula has refused to unequivocally condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine and chided the United States and Europe for not doing enough to end the war. He’s deepened ties to Moscow and Beijing. He’s dispatched a high-level delegation to meet with Venezuela's dictator Nicolas Maduro. He’s even allowed Iranian warships to dock in Rio de Janeiro.
Just last week, Lula traveled to China with 240 business executives and nearly 40 senior officials – the largest delegation he's taken abroad in three terms – to bolster ties with Brazil's largest trading partner. There, he met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and inked 15 agreements in strategic areas like agriculture, tech research and development, and deforestation.
The three-day visit differed starkly from his trip to the US in February, when he met with President Joe Biden but was joined only by select cabinet officials and held no meetings with the private sector. China surpassed the US as Brazil's largest trading partner in 2009, and it has been steadily expanding foreign direct investment in the country.
During the trip, Lula made several remarks that echoed positions taken by Moscow and Beijing and put him at odds with the West. The president backed Beijing's call for countries to ditch the US dollar and made a point of touring the Shanghai research center of Huawei, the telecommunications giant that has been placed under US sanctions, where he stated that "no one will prohibit Brazil from developing the relationships it wants."
Not for the first time, Lula also cast blame on Ukraine for Russia's illegal invasion and accused the US and Europe of "encouraging" the fighting and standing in the way of peace, all the while refusing to call for a Russian withdrawal from Ukrainian territory. Brazil has not joined Western countries in imposing sanctions on Russia and has rebuffed pleas from President Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and French President Emmanuel Macron to provide military support to Ukraine. Lula has denounced the impact of sanctions on the world's poorest countries and charged US and European military aid with prolonging the war.
Lula has been pitching himself as a neutral peace broker in the conflict, proposing a club of non-aligned nations (including Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia) to mediate negotiations. Kyiv and its Western allies view any proposals for an immediate ceasefire – whether from China or Brazil – as an opportunity for Russia to entrench its unlawful territorial gains and regroup its forces for a new offensive.
Fresh off his visit to China, Lula hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Brasilia on Monday to discuss bilateral trade and the war in Ukraine. Lavrov thanked Brazil for refusing to blame Russia for the war and pushing to end hostilities on Moscow's terms. Lavrov's trip to Brazil comes after Lula's top foreign policy adviser, Celso Amorim, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in March to discuss opening peace talks. Brasilia and Kyiv, meanwhile, have thus far only spoken by phone.
Lula's remarks and Lavrov's visit drew condemnation from the West. The White House rejected Brazil's suggestion that "the United States and Europe are somehow not interested in peace or that we share responsibility for the war," blasting Lula for "parroting Russian and Chinese propaganda." Brussels and Kyiv reacted equally poorly to Lula's both-sidesism of Russia's invasion.
Under fire, on Tuesday the president clarified that he condemns Russia's "violation of Ukraine's territorial integrity." But it was too little, too late. Lula’s statements had already sparked a flurry of commentary claiming the West has definitively lost Brazil to China.
Yet Lula's defiance of the Western consensus on Ukraine should come as no surprise given his skepticism of the US and longstanding ambition to carve out a "non-aligned" global leadership role in an increasingly multipolar world. Indeed, his recent decisions are very much in keeping with the doggedly independent and "south-south" foreign policy he pursued during his first two terms as president between 2003 and 2010, when he fostered close ties with China, Iran, and Venezuela and led the creation of the BRICS group – while also developing a fruitful relationship with US President George W. Bush.
What has changed since Lula's last stint in office is the international context. The West has fully decoupled from Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine, and the US is locked in an intensifying geopolitical competition with China that threatens to divide the world into antagonistic blocs.
Brazil, like many developing countries that are reluctant to take sides in either conflict for ideological reasons, is caught in the middle. And it has a hard choice to make. Its economy has become hugely dependent on Chinese purchases of agricultural exports and Russian supplies of fertilizer, with bilateral trade with both China and Russia hitting record highs in 2022. But the United States remains Brazil's principal security, climate change, and investment partner – and its second-largest trading partner.
A closer relationship with Beijing and Moscow doesn't signal that Brazil has picked a side. In fact, Lula is betting that the right choice amid growing geopolitical fragmentation is to refuse to choose at all. He wants to deepen ties with China and Russia, enhance cooperation with the US and Europe, and reassert Brazil's role as a leader of the so-called "global South" – all at the same time.
The Lula administration is working hard to finalize the EU-Mercosur trade agreement before the end of the year, which would significantly deepen ties between the South American bloc and Europe. It is also seeking to bolster the bilateral relationship with Washington, especially around climate change, and it hopes to host Biden in Brasilia later this year.
Lula's hedging approach resonates deeply with most developing countries, which also have no desire to choose between relations with the West and relations with China and (to a lesser extent) Russia. The risk is that he overshoots and exhausts goodwill toward Brazil in Washington and Brussels, making these relationships entirely transactional and, therefore, more vulnerable to reversals.
The rest of the world is watching closely to see if he's able to pull it off.
Macron’s Taiwan remarks are a big win for China
Emmanuel Macron is in the news again, and this time it’s not because he’s trying to get French people to work longer.
France’s president set off a firestorm last week after he said Europe should stay out of any conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan and called for Europe to lessen its dependence on the US … at the same time as he was in Beijing trying to increase Europe's dependence on China.
Much like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s trip to China a few months ago, the purpose of Macron’s three-day visit was two-fold: (1) to urge Chinese President Xi Jinping to help end the war in Ukraine and (2) to deepen commercial ties between Europe and China. Business as usual for a European leader these days.
Macron’s delegation included Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, as well as some 50 business leaders. Xi rolled out the red carpet for the French leader (not so for von der Leyen), complete with a state banquet, a military parade, and a mob of cheering students.
Everything was going swimmingly … until Macron opened his mouth.
“We don’t want to get involved in a bloc vs. bloc logic,” he stated to reporters from Les Echos and Politico aboard a flight between Beijing and Guangzhou. Rather than become a “vassal” of the US, he said, Europe should aim to become a “third superpower” independent of both Beijing and Washington, warning Europeans against getting “caught up in crises that are not ours” such as Taiwan.
Much like his repeated attempts to engage Vladimir Putin riled many in the US and Ukraine, these comments prompted sharp criticism on both sides of the Atlantic.
For starters, openly complaining about excessive dependence on the US and claiming cross-strait stability isn’t a core European interest when Europe relies so heavily on America to address crises like Ukraine, which concerns Europe much more than the US, is hypocritical. As India’s foreign minister said last year: "Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems."
To be blunt, if it weren’t for US leadership, intelligence, and weapons, the Russians would be sipping tea in Lviv. Should Europe be powerful enough to stand up to Russia and compete with China on its own? Absolutely. But the “strategic autonomy” Macron has strived for since 2017 can’t simply be talked into existence. It must be earned in the physical world through costly policy changes Europe doesn’t seem able or willing to push through.
Moreover, saying that Europeans should avoid falling in with “the US agenda and a Chinese overreaction” on Taiwan presumes the US will be the aggressor while China will simply be reacting. In reality, a conflict over Taiwan would more likely be precipitated by Beijing’s more aggressive actions to change the island’s status quo by force, against the wishes of the Taiwanese people (who don’t seem to possess any agency in Macron’s worldview).
I can’t imagine any other G7 leader acting the way Macron did, especially in today’s geopolitical environment. The timing couldn’t have been worse, happening just as Beijing was launching military exercises off Taiwan in response to President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California just days earlier.
And for what? He handed Xi a PR win, failed to extract any concessions or promises on Ukraine, undermined intra-European and trans-Atlantic unity on China, gave fodder to American isolationists like Donald Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley, and weakened Western deterrence of Chinese aggression against Taiwan. But at least we're not talking about his pension reform.
All this is not to say France, an important NATO ally, nuclear power, and permanent UN Security Council member, doesn’t have every right – and plenty of reasons – to express concerns about US leadership. The Biden administration’s handling of the AUKUS submarine snub was an embarrassment and did lasting damage to the bilateral relationship. Trump’s “America First” treatment of US allies no doubt scarred the Elysée Palace, too, sowing the initial seeds of mistrust and prompting Macron to seek out alternatives to a “brain dead” NATO.
But you’d think that Washington’s muscular response to the Russian invasion, which by Macron’s own admission was an “electroshock” for the trans-Atlantic alliance, would have assuaged his fears. Think again. Partly, that’s a logical response to the prospect of another Trump presidency. But in part it’s structural, born of a deep-seated ambivalence toward the US and ambition to be a geopolitical “balancing power” that has characterized French foreign policy since Charles de Gaulle. Plus ça change …
The point is that France should air its grievances – however legitimate – with the United States and fellow allies. Even if he said nothing new, Macron voicing them publicly while in China, given the asymmetry of the US-France relationship, the intensifying strategic competition between Washington and Beijing, and America’s outsized role in Ukraine’s defense, reflects poor judgment.
Whether it leads to a broader rift in the trans-Atlantic alliance is an open question, but two things are clear from this episode.
First, while there is near-total alignment between the US and its allies on the need to decouple economically from Russia, the same cannot be said about decoupling from China. As Beijing has long suspected, economic diplomacy can be a pretty effective way to buy off at least some of Washington’s friends.
Second, China is decisively leaning into the role of global peacemaker, and it is finding lots of takers. Coming on the back of the proposed 12-point framework for peace in Ukraine and the Beijing-brokered détente between the hitherto irreconcilable Iran and Saudi Arabia, the momentum of its diplomatic push is undeniable.
Xi’s got to be feeling pretty good about himself these days.
Backlash from Macron's China visit
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Happy Monday. It's Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off our week. And I want to talk a little bit about French President Emmanuel Macron, who is in the news again this week and not for demonstrations at home. Not for trying to change the pension age from 62 to 64, I mean that and the backlash has been dominating international coverage of the French president for weeks now. But this time around, it's what he's saying on the international stage.
Specifically, Macron has just completed a trip to China with Ursula von der Leyen and brought a whole bunch of business leaders with him. Nothing shocking about that. Olaf Scholz did the same a few months ago when he went to Beijing. Was talking about Xi Jinping playing more of a role on the Russia, Ukraine crisis. There, that is a bit different than what we've seen from other leaders. It was in the G-20 in Bali when Macron went off-piste and basically said, "Hey, we'd love to have Xi Jinping engaged directly in leading diplomacy, responding to the Russian invasion." The Americans were skeptical, a number of other Western leaders a little concerned that Macron had made those statements without talking to them about it but didn't really go anywhere.
This time around, it's both a call for Europe to be less dependent on the United States, at the same time that France is in Beijing trying to increase their dependence on China, saying that the EU should not be involved in conflicts where it is not a direct party and mentioning Taiwan specifically. While of course the United States is leading military support on Ukraine, much more important to the Europeans than it is to the US. And also pushing for much more bilateral China, French engagement of Russia, Ukraine, which isn't going anywhere, at least not right now.
The response to all of that has been a level of mistrust. I mean frankly this was, until Macron started talking about the trip, was going very well. He was treated extremely well by the Chinese Government. He was welcomed. It was very much a red carpet treatment. He had lots of Chinese students that were cheering for him, displaying a lot of enthusiasm. Some of which was ginned up by the Chinese Government, but some of which might well have just been spontaneous. And the coverage, the press coverage, the social media coverage was very positive.
Macron then decided that he was going to push a lot of criticism of the United States, and of course that, especially in China itself, given the nature of the US, China relationship was not responded well to at all. It is probably the worst bilateral relationship in the G-7. It's the one leader that Biden doesn't particularly trust. It is quite probably mutual. There's lots of reasons for it. I mean in part, of course, the French Government has always had a more independent view of its own leadership role, and concerns about US exceptionalism, US hypocrisy, and France wanting an out sized role given their permanent seat, for example, at the Security Council, as well as given their historical imperial roles internationally.
Also, at the beginning of the Biden administration, the AUKUS debacle where the French were displaced by the US and the UK for multi-billion-dollar submarine deals, and the French found out about it on CNN, and you may remember the French withdrew their ambassador at that point. This is the kind of flap that just really shouldn't have happened, and in part because France wasn't really trusted and because Kurt Campbell, who was sort of the Asia czar in the White House, in the National Security Council, didn't see fit to talk to the French about it, basically thought that they were irrelevant to the Asian theater. And Anthony Blinken, the secretary of state, who speaks French fluently and has a quite good relationship with his French interlocutors, wasn't really driving Asia policy and didn't assert himself as much as he probably should have. So an embarrassment for the US, France relationship. Biden apologized about it. Hoping that all of this was fixed, but not really.
Now, the fact that French President Macron had said that NATO was brain dead back before the Russian invasion in his talk of strategic autonomy, well, that of course is something that does stick in everyone's popular consciousness. But after the Russian invasion, of course NATO became much more relevant. And indeed, Macron said it was like an electroshock for NATO at the time. And so there was a hope that that level of coordination, the defense coordination, the economic coordination, remember the EU unanimously voted to allow Ukraine membership process, unanimously has supported 10 rounds of sanctions, soon to be 11, France playing a leadership role just like everyone else. So there really was a hope that Macron's personal aspirations and ambitions for broader leadership, as well as his irritation and peak at the United States was something that had been largely assuaged. What we're seeing right now is that really is not the case and is not the case in particular as US, China relations are getting a lot worse.
One other point that I would raise here is the fact that while there is and remains very strong alignment between the United States and pretty much all of its allies on Russia, on a full decoupling of Russia economically, and strong punishment of Russia on the international stage, not something that Global South agrees with at all. That when it comes to China, the United States increasingly sees China as a hostile national security threat that should extend to significant strategic economic interactions. On critical minerals for example, on semiconductors, for example, other places. That is not met with anywhere near the same level of agreement among US allies. Almost all US allies want strong security relations with the US, but also want strong economic relations with China. Especially as China's about to become the largest economy in the world. And in that regard, the Germans, the French, and others are closer to the US private sector orientation towards China, most of them, than they are to the US Government, Democrats or Republicans.
But despite that tension, it hasn't been put on public display the way we've seen from Macron over the last 48 hours. That's unfortunate and will surely lead to backlash. Whether it leads to a broader rift in the transatlantic relationship is an open question. Let's see how the Germans, how the Italians in particular respond to Macron on this issue.
That's it for me, I'll talk to you all real soon.