An Odd Hostility in the Americas

Roger Cohen

The New York Times

Two vast countries in the same hemisphere, with the same can-do appetite for the future, populated by far-flung immigrants subsuming their differences into the same powerful sense of nationhood, with the same commitment to democratic governance and free enterprise, drawn to each other by the same mutual attraction among their peoples, find their relations at or close to an all-time low.

There may be more perplexing international relationships in the world than the troubled one between the United States and Brazil, but there are not many. A natural friendship has fissured under unnatural strain. A perverse estrangement prevails.

Brazil, a kind of tropical United States, finds it difficult to connect to Washington, and vice versa. The nation that might have been America’s closest ally (even without a formal alliance) among the rising powers is now anything but. China, a more trusted interlocutor, has become Brazil’s largest trading partner, with U.S.-Brazil ties consigned to a vacuum as Brazil prepares to host the World Cup this year and the Olympics in 2016.

The immediate cause of the difficulties has been the fallout from the revelation that the National Security Agency had spied on the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, and her subsequent cancellation of a planned state visit to Washington last October. Since then, relations between President Obama and the Brazilian leader have been frozen. Brazil wants an apology, which it will not get, or at least a significant American gesture, of which there is no sign. Unhappy with Brazil’s political direction, the Obama administration is not on the verge of a bout of contrition.

Prodded by Rousseff’s left-of-center Workers’ Party, Brazilian foreign policy has of late been as open-armed toward Venezuela and Cuba as it has been cool toward Washington. Following Venezuela’s admission in 2012, Mercosur, the South American trading bloc dominated by Brazil, has turned into a sort of anti-Yankee talk shop (in contrast to the Pacific Alliance, another newer trading bloc of more buoyant economies whose members, including Chile and Peru, are pro-American).

The 50th anniversary this year of the coup that brought military rule to Brazil, and led to the arrest of Rousseff, a leftist guerrilla fighter in her student days, has provided the occasion for more criticism of the United States, which was supportive of the army’s intervention. The spying scandal has spurred the facile notion that nothing has changed, when in fact just about everything has.

Brazil’s rise, stalled for now with its economy in the fourth year of slow growth, might naturally have led to the end of the complexes that troubled its relations with Washington, as the Cold War’s shadow receded. Instead, difficulties have intensified. Brazil recently decided to buy Swedish fighter jets, snubbing Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornets. Ambitious plans for cooperation in defense, renewable energy and nuclear and space technologies are largely on hold.
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A high-level meeting here of the Aspen Strategy Group and Brazil’s Center of Public Leadership was marked by broad agreement on the acuity of the problems but little sense that any improvement is imminent. Rousseff, whose popularity is falling, is fighting for re-election in October. Brazilians want change, opinion polls show, but neither of the two major opposition candidates has yet gained significant momentum. In this tense political atmosphere, Rousseff is not about to second-guess her rebuff to Obama last year; nor will she back down from her demand for an apology. Both steps contained a large measure of political calculation in the first place. They were cheered, whatever the long-term consequences.
With its economy nearly stalled, its currency slipping, inflation on the rise, vast infrastructure projects and ambitious plans for the development of huge offshore oil deposits delayed and over-budget, Brazil would certainly benefit from greater cooperation with the United States. Caracas and Havana are not going to build the future of a great nation. Brazil should reverse its anti-Washington pivot. America, in turn, should make close ties with Brazil, its natural partner in the Southern Hemisphere, a strategic priority. At some point a gesture like a U.S. statement of support for Brazil becoming a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (a Brazilian ambition) could be helpful and justified.

The problem is that the current crisis in Brazilian-American relations never quite rises to the top of the strategic agenda. Neither president has close senior advisers pushing the issue or looking for creative solutions. This is understandable but regrettable. Such solutions are needed. They won’t be found without a determined effort.

Meanwhile the millions of Brazilians traveling north to buy apartments in Miami or shop in New York, and the many Americans drawn to the splendors of Brazil and finding in it a tropical version of their own land of immigration and promise, will push for people-to-people closeness against a backdrop of official alienation. With luck they will win in the end.

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