Brazil and the U.S.: Navigating Diplomatic Challenges

 Strategic diplomacy is a fairly new idea in the field of international relations. It was created by Jochen Prantl and Evelyn Goh (2016) and was first used to look at East Asian foreign policy. They wanted to know how states create long-term diplomacy to deal with the very complicated and interconnected international system during times of power shifts, new international events, and strategic surprises. Importantly, strategic diplomacy can be used as both a way to figure out what's wrong and a way to plan policy (Prantl 2022). In 2019, Prantl asked a group of IR experts who study Brazilian foreign policy to look into how useful it would be to apply the idea to Brazil. After that, this was published in 2022 in a special section of the academic magazine Contemporary Politics.

In order to practice strategic diplomacy

States must keep their strategic goals in check at the system level and be flexible, quick to act, and responsive at the unit level. It also means knowing and analyzing both the goals and limits of choices and actions in foreign policy. There is an even greater desire to protect sovereignty and stay out of US-led efforts in South America, especially in Brazil (Prantl 2022). Because of this, strategic diplomacy is often used to at least put these issues first. Because strategic diplomacy means focusing on long-term goals in foreign policy, it needs a level of agreement among society and institutions to be used to guide actions in foreign policy. In the past, these conditions were met in Brazil, thanks to the Ministry of External Relations, also known as the Itamaraty, having strong institutions and a lot of experience with running a government. Brazilian officials have a long history of doing great work in diplomacy, which is true (Cheibub 1985). Because the ministry wasn't too formal, it was able to keep things consistent and have a longer-term view of policy, all of which helped create the right conditions for strategic diplomacy. As the country became more democratic and a new constitution was written in 1988, lawmakers became more interested in foreign policy. This was especially true for trade talks and other areas of global governance, like climate change and finance (Amorim 2010; Cason and Power 2009). Because the Constitution says the government has to put out four-year pluriannual plans, governments quickly started including "grand objectives and strategic direction," such as foreign policy goals, in their plans (Lessa, Couto & Farias 2009). This unintentionally made it easier for strategic negotiation to take hold. Brazil's economic and political liberalization made it harder to limit foreign policy to the interests, tastes, and power of the elite by the end of the 20th century. People became much more interested in foreign policy as a result, which had an effect on how and what decisions were made in foreign policy (Cardoso 2019; Doctor 2017; Farias and Ramanzini Junior 2015; Lopes 2017; Milani and Pinheiro 2017). In an interesting twist, this could have made strategic negotiation less likely to work. To be more specific, the wide range of people in society who are interested in foreign policy needed more consideration when negotiating strategic ideas and goals at the domestic level that did not agree with each other. Because of this, it might be harder to make strategic negotiation work in real life. It's true that Brazil had many of the conditions and signs of strategic diplomacy, but that doesn't mean that Brazil's foreign policy always followed these traits. It changed over time and in different issue areas. As conditions in the system kept changing, the need to adapt all the time became more pressing. As Spektor (2022) points out, these rolling changes also limited Brazil's ability to use power in national defense. Also, Brazil's politics changed a lot in the second half of the 2010s. This was because of a lot of things, such as Operation Car Wash/Lava Jato revealing a huge amount of corruption (Pontes and Anselmo 2022). People's response to the harsh economic downturn of 2015–2016 (Hunter and Power 2019); the rise of evangelicals in politics (Lapper 2021; Amorim Neto and Pimenta 2020); and the effect of social media on political communication (Oyama 2020).

Despite the changes listed above, Brazil's foreign policy has generally had two major goals

Policy autonomy as a middle goal and national development as a final goal. Different types of autonomy have been sought in foreign policy over time, such as autonomy through participation, integration, and diversity (Vigevani and Cepaluni 2009). Some researchers say that there has been a long-lasting "quest for autonomy" (Hurrell 2013; Spektor 2015), while others say that it has also gone through "swings and breaks" (Caballero and Crescentino 2020), with changes in how autonomy was seen happening during times of foreign policy breakdown (Pinheiro and Lima 2018). It basically meant that Brazilian policymakers were always looking for room to make changes. In the same way, the types of development results that democratic Brazil wanted changed over time, going from focusing on industrial and economic development to focusing on human and social development to focusing on long-term development. The goals were very important because they had important moral, strategic, and practical effects on the ideas of authority and non-interference1. The words "autonomy" and "development" not only explained Brazil's foreign policy goals, but they also stood for important ideas that changed over time. In the past few years, the two ideas' meanings have been "shaken to the core" (Spektor 2022, 21), which has changed how the real goals are to be reached. Still, they shaped some aspects of Brazilian diplomacy that have stayed the same since the end of the military regime in the mid-1980s until Bolsonaro was elected in 2018. These were non-interference, multilateralism, pacifism, building consensus, regional involvement, and making sure there were a lot of different partners (Caballero and Crescentino 2020). 

Furthermore, Brazil had a series of presidents from 1995 to 2018 who were very aware of the country's needs and its place in world politics 

Even though their goals were very different. In their foreign policies, they also tried to find a balance between world and regional goals (Ramanzini Junior and Mariano 2018). During this time, all of the presidents used some elements of strategic diplomacy, but that doesn't mean they all had the same foreign policies.There was always talk about foreign policy priorities and changes when a new president took office, but researchers found that, despite the ups and downs of Brazilian foreign policy, it mostly stuck to the goals and features we've already talked about. For instance, the foreign policy of the Workers' Party (PT) governments was different in two main ways: (i) they took more assertive positions in multilateral organizations based on the idea of Brazil as a "emerging power"; and (ii) they put a lot of emphasis on South-South Cooperation and relationships with other Global South countries (see Amorim 2010; 2017). Still, most studies found that Presidents Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016), who led Brazil for thirteen years under the PT, mostly stuck to the normal rules of democratic Brazil's foreign policy, with President Cardoso's (1995–2002) foreign policy often used as a guide.