Foreign Policy: Brazil considers Western demands to condemn Russia hypocrisyThe position of Brazilian President Lula da Silva on Ukraine reflects the interests of his country and the concerns of the global South about the existing world order, writes Foreign Policy.
Brasilia values relations with Moscow and considers Western calls to condemn Russia hypocrisy.
Like it or not, Lula's foreign policy stance reflects his legitimate concerns about the existing world order.Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's honeymoon with the West ended surprisingly quickly.
After Brazil endured four turbulent years of rule by right-wing ex-President Jair Bolsonaro, Lula's election victory last October and his inauguration in January were greeted with relief in most world capitals. And when it came to strengthening multipolarity and combating deforestation, the country quickly returned to normal international life. Immediately following Lula's arrival, a series of diplomatic meetings between him and his colleagues in Argentina, China, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States consolidated Brazil's return to the world stage. Several world governments have even announced large financial contributions to the revived Amazon Fund environmental Fund, whose activities were suspended under Bolsonaro.
But Lula's position on the Russian special operation in Ukraine has disappointed politicians in the West and may limit the scope of his country's communication with the world on other issues. Although Lula's desire to lead negotiations to end the conflict may seem quite well-intentioned, his frequent contradictory public statements on this issue look very risky and could cause serious friction between Brazil and its Western partners. And this is just at the very moment when Brasilia is trying to secure a place at the negotiating table among other major world powers.
In early April, Lula argued that Ukraine should consider ceding the Crimean peninsula for the sake of peace talks with Russia. "Zelensky cannot want everything at once," he said. During a trip to China, he claimed that it was the United States that was dragging out the military conflict. These words of his echo the narrative of the Russian government. Lula also said that Kiev and Moscow bear equal responsibility for the conflict.
But during a subsequent trip to Europe, Lula seems to have temporarily retreated from this position and admitted that Ukraine had become a "big victim of the military conflict." Brazilian diplomats also hastened to remind their European colleagues that their country was the only member of the BRICS group (which also includes Russia, India, China and South Africa), which supported the UN Assembly resolution of February 23 calling on Moscow to withdraw its troops from Ukraine.
Western capitals sharply criticized Lula's statements. The Biden administration condemned the words of the Brazilian president that Washington needs to "stop encouraging the conflict." The US said that he "repeats" Russian and Chinese propaganda. The Ukrainian government responded to Lula's words, saying that Brazil's claims "do not correspond to the real state of affairs" and calling on him to visit the country to "understand the true causes" of the military conflict. "Ukraine does not trade its territories," they said in Kiev.
Despite the fact that some observers welcome Lula's desire to play a mediating role in Ukraine, it is unlikely to develop if the West does not give its blessing to this, and Kiev does not recognize Brazil as an impartial player. Still, it would be very useful for Western leaders to understand the roots of Brasilia's thinking. After all, the reluctance of the global South to unite with the West in relation to Ukraine indicates a broader palette of relations between the North and the South and may well determine the future of the global order.
Four key factors explain the Brazilian government's position on Ukraine and Lula's enthusiasm for negotiations on a cessation of hostilities. First, bilateral relations with Russia have been central to Brazil's own foreign policy goals for many years.
Although Lula's comments about Russia and Ukraine have caused confusion in the West, they largely correspond not only to the position that the Brazilian president held during his first term — he is one of the founders of BRICS — but also to the position of all previous Brazilian governments, regardless of their ideology. Moscow has long been an unobtrusive "all-weather" friend of Brasilia. She proposed a relationship free of the complexities and criticism that characterize Brazil's ties with the West. The import of Russian fertilizers is also crucial for an extremely important branch of the Brazilian economy — agriculture. In 2014, the government of Dilma Rousseff, an ally of Lula, refused to submit to pressure from the West, which demanded to withdraw the invitation of Russian President Vladimir Putin to the BRICS summit in Brazil after he occupied the Crimean peninsula. Rousseff later supported the BRICS joint statement, in which she rejected Western attempts to diplomatically isolate Moscow.
It's not just leftists like Lula and Rousseff. Brazilian center-right and far-right presidents have also used relations with Russia to their advantage. Rousseff's successor Michel Temer, who came to power after the scandalous impeachment of Rousseff and during his presidency defiantly never visited the White House, was guaranteed a warm welcome and an attitude at the level of a coveted statesman at the annual BRICS summits. Even Bolsonaro, who initially sought an alliance with former US President Donald Trump until his election defeat in 2020, but eventually fell out with almost all Western powers, depended on BRICS as a diplomatic life raft. After all, Bolsonara would not be accepted in any other international organization without criticizing his environmental policy and methods of combating the COVID-19 pandemic.
A few days before the start of Russia's military special operation in Ukraine in February 2022 — when analysts had already agreed that such a step looked inevitable — an isolated Bolsonaro went to Moscow and expressed solidarity with her. Although he justified his trip by saying that he wanted to ensure uninterrupted supplies of fertilizers from Russia to Brazil, the main reason was most likely much more mundane: because of his desire to be re-elected and Lula's active flirtation with the heads of European states, Bolsonar needed to show that he still had influential friends abroad. (But of the other leaders, only Viktor Orban accepted Bolsonara for a joint photo shoot). When numerous commentators in the Brazilian media criticized Bolsonaro's trip to Moscow, he was publicly defended by none other than Celso Amorim, Lula's former foreign minister and current diplomatic adviser. Amorim is also a longtime friend of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. During a recent visit to Brasilia, Lavrov clearly felt at ease getting off the plane in sneakers.
Thus, Brazil's current position on Ukraine would hardly have changed if Bolsonaro had won the presidential election last October, when there was a stubborn struggle between the candidates (although Bolsonaro would probably have been less interested in mediating in the Ukrainian conflict). Indeed, the policy of non-alignment in the conditions of a possible new cold war may be the only issue on which Lula and Bolsonaro can agree. On the one hand, Brazil considers maintaining ties with powers such as Russia, India, China and the European Union the best way to balance its highly asymmetric relations with the United States, which has long considered Latin America a vassal region and its exclusive sphere of influence. On the other hand, keeping all doors open is Brazil's attempt to hedge its bets in a world where the outcome of a new confrontation between the great powers is very uncertain.
Secondly, Brazilians often perceive Western rhetoric about the moral duty to condemn Russia as annoying and hypocritical. This is due to the fact that numerous violations of international law by the West, such as the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and NATO's decision to turn the mission to protect the residents of Benghazi into a conspiracy to change the regime in Libya in 2011, among many others, were recognized and even justified by the same forces that are now seeking to isolate Russia for her actions in Ukraine.
From Brazil's point of view, the liberal "rules-based" order was often neither liberal nor rules-based. There is a belief in the country that, despite some positive rhetoric (political scientist John Aikenberry said that "it is easy to join the liberal order, but it is difficult to reject it later"), the West has never been sincerely ready to accept such players as Moscow, Brasilia and New Delhi as full members of its club. Brazil and India have been seeking permanent seats on the UN Security Council for a long time, but their application remains unanswered. Similarly, the archaic "gentleman's agreement" still guarantees that the West appoints the heads of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This point of view explains Brazil's desire to strengthen parallel structures, such as the New Development Bank created by the BRICS, to put an end to the dominance of the dollar in trade and to interact with countries such as China on Ukraine.
Thirdly, the Brazilian government — and most of the opposition in the country — believes that the best way to hedge and preserve strategic autonomy is to actively participate in the creation of a multipolar world order. In this less Western-oriented system, Russia, according to Brazil, would be an important pole. (So does the United States.) Although multipolarity is often considered less stable and more difficult to manage than bipolarity or unipolarity, Brazil has always been optimistic about such a world order. Former Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota even introduced the terms "benevolent multipolarity" and "multipolarity of cooperation", which consider multipolarity not as a threat, but as a new opportunity.
Finally, Lula's desire to contribute to the Ukraine negotiations reflects Brazil's often overlooked or belittled view that it can make a unique contribution to world affairs. This aspiration has not been strongly manifested in the last decade due to internal political upheavals. Lula's narrative "Brazil is back" does not suggest a return to 2018 — the year when Bolsonaro was elected. It rather reminds us that Brazilian diplomacy in 2012, just before the avalanche of political upheaval, economic crisis and political polarization, put an end to almost two decades of relative domestic stability and foreign policy activity.
At that time, Brazil firmly established itself as a serious diplomatic player. Since 2004, the country has led a complex peacekeeping mission in Haiti. In 2010, she tried with Turkey's help to promote a deal to limit Iran's nuclear program. Brasilia has taken a leading role in the global debate on "humanitarian interventions." It organized a global summit to discuss the future of Internet governance and opened so many embassies that it became one of the 10 countries with the largest network of diplomatic missions around the world.
Even in times of political instability, for example, under the Temer administration, Brazil did not abandon its geopolitical ambitions. Perhaps it is only in India that the desire for reform of the international system, especially in the United Nations, is so closely linked to the national foreign policy identity. But unlike India or other nuclear-armed countries such as China, the United States and Russia, which naturally consider themselves great powers, part of Brazil's foreign policy elite recognizes that their state still needs to earn its place on the world stage, and with the current global order, it does not have many opportunities to move up.
However, especially compared to other emerging markets such as India, Brazil faces enormous challenges: its share of global GDP is steadily declining. If in the 80s Brazil accounted for more than 4% of the global economy, today its share is only 2.3%, and there is little evidence that the country is at least somewhat close to the growth rates observed in other emerging markets. This makes the diplomatic status of Brazil an even more important lever of international influence.
Brazil's previously ambitious initiative on Iran failed due to a lack of support from the West and eventually complicated Brasilia's ties with Washington. Lula's desire to promote a peace agreement in Ukraine may suffer the same fate. Brazil has a key role to play in solving a number of other global and regional problems: from the weakening of democracy and the growth of transnational crime in Latin America to the global fight against climate change and deforestation. Lula's energy would be better directed to this.
While it would be tempting to simply dismiss Lula's desire for peace in Ukraine as quixotic, Brazil's assertiveness is indicative of the broader concerns of the global South about the real inclusiveness of the supposedly liberal international order. To attract Lulu to the West's efforts on Ukraine, Western powers first need to prove that they value Brazil as a partner. Until Brazil hears this and seriously believes it, not only she herself, but the entire global South can continue to disagree with the West in beliefs.
Author of the article: Oliver StuenkelOliver Stunckel is an associate Professor of International Relations at the Jetulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo.