Bolsonaro’s Subservience to Trump,2019 and 2020: A Demanding Agenda and Limited Reciprocity

Approaches to International Negotiations: Agenda and Bargaining Power

Adapting Hudson’s (2005) approach, our paper takes as the explanandum the relationship between Brazil and the United States in 2019 and 2020 and as the explanans aspects of the decision-making process and the influence of the actors involved. Of the degrees of change described by Hermann (1990)—(1) adjustment changes, (2) program changes, (3) problem/goal changes, and (4) international orientation—we highlight the last. Kingdon (1995) argues that critical circumstances can generate policy windows for public policy by aligning the problem stream, the policy stream, and the political stream, which together produce major changes in agenda priorities. Policy windows can be expected when there are changes of government. The Bolsonaro administration’s identification with the Trump administration’s perceptions of political problems and alternatives opened up a policy window that was radical compared with the traditional principles of Brazilian politics.

Pendergast (1990) argues that the agenda is one of the most important structural aspects of a negotiation, since it may determine power and influence in the process and describes the tactics and strategies that should be considered in a negotiation: (1) its scope, (2) the sequence and order of issues, (3) its framing, (4) whether proposals will be packaged or sequential, and (5) the nature of the formula through which it is presented. Here, it is key to clarify what is meant by a “demanding agenda.” Bolsonaro was seeking agreements that were in the interest of its partners and therefore susceptible to being used to increase his domestic power. The official bilateral agenda detailed the issues that were the focus of negotiations: "integration of value chains; improvement of the business environment; promotion of investment; facilitation and reduction of bureaucracy in trade; expansion of joint initiatives in science, technology, and innovation and strengthening of cooperation in defense, security, energy, outer space, education, and culture" (Ministério de Relações Exteriores, 2020). While the scope of the agenda was not entirely trade-centered, the first four of these topics were in fact related to trade.

Pendergast argues that packaging strategy can generate more efficient agreements both because the parties are called upon to engage in trade-offs and because it is based on confidence of reciprocity. The packaging strategy can be used to push forward major global agreements such as the Marrakesh Treaty of 1994, which created the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the environmental agreements that originated in the Rio de Janeiro Conference in 1992. This strategy was also adopted for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), since it made it possible for the heads of state at the Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata in November 2005 to close out the negotiations when parts of their states were opposed to its continuing.

Pendergast also identifies a hidden agenda that is part of bilateral negotiations—a set of issues that, while they do not formally originate in direct measures by states, do influence the nature of relationships. In this process, business interest groups such as Amcham, CNI, and the Brazil–United States Business Council exerted substantial influence. The demands of these groups had been seen in previous periods, as in the Brazilian mission’s agenda in Washington in 2014 (Flores, 2014), and had existed for decades. In the 2000s, beginning in the Lula da Silva administration and particularly in the failed FTAA negotiations, this agenda began losing influence in bilateral negotiations, but it came back with force following Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016, with signs of the opening of a policy window that became a reality once the Trump and Bolsonaro administrations took power. One significant element was the similarity between the two administrations on ideological and geopolitical aspects. The Bolsonaro administration employed its discourse in such a way as to generate interpretations about its ability to produce outcomes and trade-offs, seeking to create perceptions about relative gains and reciprocity in the negotiation process. An example of this was the unreciprocated visa waivers for U.S. citizens, which, despite criticism, members of the Brazilian government attempted to interpret as in the national interest.

In international negotiations, the parties involved often find themselves in differing positions of power, and when this occurs there are strategies whereby negotiators with less power can leverage their gains. When it comes to the negotiations between Brazil and the United States, this imbalance needs to be taken into account. The weaker party’s capacity for negotiation can be strengthened through a simultaneous instead of sequential agenda (Balakrishna et al., 1993) and through comprehensive agreements that, for example, involve issues of investment in technology, security, and defense—in other words, agreements that encompass more than one agenda.

Another important strategy in international negotiations involves the use of alliances and coalitions—multilateral ways of increasing bargaining capacity in an asymmetric situation. Multilateralism like that adopted within the G-20 is one example. In the international negotiations during the Bolsonaro term, such as those focused on joining the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the administration gave up on a coalition perspective that would have made it possible to find allies among the BRICS or the Mercosur countries.

Interpretations of Changes in Brazilian Foreign Policy

In the multiple interpretations of Brazilian foreign policy, there are contrasting analyses of its position with regard to the United States in the course of history. Autonomy (Bandeira, 1973; Hirst, 2008; Chilcote, 2014; Ricupero, 2017) was significantly greater in the Goulart and Lula da Silva administrations (Amorim, 2015; Soares de Lima, 2018) and even in the military government of Geisel, albeit for different reasons (Spektor, 2009), while in the administrations of Dutra (Malan et al., 1980), Castello Branco (Loureiro, 2019), and Collor de Mello (Veiga, 1994) there was a closer alignment with the United States. This alignment was hardly unconditional. Even when there was an effective alliance, efforts were made to preserve the national interest, at least to a certain extent (McCann Jr., 1973; Skidmore, 1988). Alongside the binary analysis of alignment and autonomy, the development aspect addressed in dependency theory can bring important explanatory elements to the analytical framework. In the 1970s, Marini (2000) argued that the only way to confront and overcome the dependency experienced by Latin American countries, including Brazil, was through a socialist revolution. ¹ From this perspective, underdeveloped countries were dependent because they reproduced a social system whose development was limited by national and international political and economic relations. For Marini (2000:109), dependency was to be understood as “a relationship of subordination between formally independent nations, within which the production relationships of subordinate nations are modified or recreated to ensure the expanded reproduction of dependency.” The fundamental obstacle to any real development process was imperialism, which extracted practically all the surplus that underdeveloped countries produced (Marini, 1978).

From Escudé’s (1995) perspective of peripheral realism, autonomy was an end in itself, as was the defense of multilateralism, rather than the goal of development. Under peripheral realism, achieving a greater degree of development was easier in association with developed capitalist countries, particularly the United States, which had a greater capacity for global projection. According to Escudé, this did not preclude the defense of specific and localized national interests.

According to Loureiro (2019), if one wanted to compare the Bolsonaro administration’s direction with a previous experience one would have to choose the 1964 military coup. For him, the Castello Branco administration made a U-turn, abandoning the independent foreign policy of Jânio Quadros and João Goulart and resolutely moving closer to the United States, with radical changes in its position in the world—an international orientation as described by Hermann (1990).

Ever since the process that culminated in the PT’s exiting the country’s presidency in May 2016 following Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, vigorous arguments favoring alignment or convergence of values and interests with the United States have taken over. The use of lawfare methods contributed to this change, which began in the interim Michel Temer administration and became more accentuated in 2019. The weaknesses of the PT governments were detected to some extent by party leaders and intellectuals connected to a developmentalist-distributivist perspectives but above all by left-wing critics. Academic writings on the Lula da Silva and Rousseff administrations (Berringer, 2015) were clear on the difference between being in government and having effective command of the state. Even so, the destabilization that took place in 2016 had an element of surprise. The explanation for this will require research, but it most certainly will involve values, morality, rights, economics, and foreign policy. Above all, it is a matter of the connections between internal politics (the economy, social relations) and foreign policy.

On foreign policy, the interest lies in understanding the ideas put forth by Bolsonaro’s minister of foreign affairs, Ernesto Araújo (2017: 354): “In Itamaraty, over the decades, we have learned to avoid at all costs any submission of Brazil to a bloc, in an effort to preserve our capacity to develop an autonomous foreign policy. . . . Brazil—even if it does not want to be—is part of the West, and that West is—even if it doesn’t see it—stuck in a conflict of gigantic proportions for its very survival.” Araújo argues for the need to forge a deep identification with the West, which for him is represented by Trump, and therefore Brazil’s foreign policy needs both a foreign metapolitics and a theopolitics—a total repositioning. With regard to Bolsonaro’s redirection of foreign policy, all of the former foreign ministers agreed that it was “distancing itself from the universalist vocation of Brazilian foreign policy and its capacity for dialogue and building bridges with a variety of countries, whether they be developed or developing, to benefit our interests” (Cardoso et al., 2020).

Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s Weltanschauung resembled conservative, traditionalist, and extreme economic liberal values—combating gender ideology, climate-change denial, defending the religious principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition, etc. (J. Anderson, 2019). For Casarões (2020: 87–88): “Bolsonaro’s foreign policy displays an ultraconservative ideology that goes well beyond defending the Christian faith. . . . After all, he wanted to associate his own image with Donald Trump’s, as the nation-loving underdog who ultimately spoke on behalf of the silent majority,” According to Velasco e Cruz (2019), this approach to foreign policy made sense only if the instrumental perspective of private interests was adopted to strengthen Bolsonaro’s supporters. Almeida (2019) analyzes the Bolsonaro administration’s diplomacy as one of total alignment with and subservience to Trump, leading Brazil to completely break with its previous actions. Soares de Lima and Albuquerque (2019), along with Nobre (2019), point out that the overt use of ideology and even alignment with the United States are nothing new to Brazilian politics. The new elements here are the methods applied and the instrumental use of chaos—strategies that seek to undermine the credibility of traditional institutions to maintain the antisystem electoral base, especially through the social media.

The term "pariah" has been applied to the administration by several important specialists, including Rubens Ricupero (Leitão, 2020). Araújo (2020), in acknowledging the extent of the debate on the term, addressed the issue in a speech to the graduates of the Instituto Rio Branco: "It doesn’t matter that Brazil seems a pariah in the world." Rather, he sought to oppose this idea, betting all his chips on the bilateral relationship with Trump. The Bolsonaro administration invested in continuing this relationship, which ended up being interrupted by Joe Biden’s victory.

The Bilateral Agenda: Case Studies

Trade Negotiations

As we have seen, in the period analyzed, trade occupied four positions on Brazil’s official agenda. In 2019, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross emphasized the idea that the two countries should work together to reduce barriers and facilitate investment in various sectors from energy to agriculture and technology. He signaled the United States’ economic, commercial, and political objectives related to Brazil as follows (Ross, 2019):

President Trump is committed to a strong and dynamic relationship with Brazil, one that promotes democracy, commerce, and regional stability. One of President Bolsonaro’s first acts as Brazil’s new president was to declare a desire for the United States to become Brazil’s number one trade and investment partner. Currently, Brazil is our thirteenth-largest trade partner globally and third in the Western Hemisphere after Canada and Mexico.

According to the Ministry of the Economy’s ComexVis (Ministerio da Economia, 2019), the Brazilian export basket to the United States in 2019 was 82.7 percent manufactures, which partly explains the interest of business associations in advancing in bilateral relations. Since 2009 China has been Brazil’s largest trading partner, receiving 0.7 percent of its exports in 1991, 2.0 percent in 2000, and 15.2 percent in 2010 before jumping to 28.1 percent in 2019. Meanwhile, the United States in those same years received 20.1 percent. 24.3 percent, 9.6 percent, and 13.2 percent of Brazilian exports (Comtrade, December 20, 2020), but these exports were of higher value added. China received mostly commodities. In the context in which this new commodity-based Brazilian economy was gaining ground, business groups that defended a closer relationship with the United States used this as their argument. While China’s importance to Brazil and to the world as a whole is no small matter, Bolsonaro and his inner circle appear to deny this reality, generating an attitude that has caused diplomatic incidents in Sino-Brazilian relations.

The United States has a trade deficit with almost all its partners, Brazil being one of the few with which it has a surplus (Figure 1). This imbalance has existed since 2009. The greatest weight has been in services, where the positive balance in 2020 for the United States was US$10.2 billion for services and US$11.2 billion for goods (BEA, 2021). Following this trend, there is no prospect of improving Brazil’s balance of trade.

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Figure 1.

U.S. trade in goods and services with Brazil (seasonally adjusted), 2009–2020 (data from https://www.bea.gov/data/intl-trade-investment/international-trade-goods-and-services [accessed September 22, 2022]).

The argument most used by the Americans in their foreign affairs—their interest in reducing the trade deficit (Drezner, 2006)—is not used by Brazil as a significant bargaining chip. It is not that we are ignoring the fact that economic theory exhaustively discusses the role of foreign affairs and that the balance of trade is not the only factor (Kindleberger, 1989; Cohen, 2014; Bresser Pereira, 2018). Others include investment, technology, quality of exchanges, insertion in production chains, exchange rate, educational level, technological development, allocation of resources, military power, cultural hegemony, transportation, etc.

Figure 2 provides data on the flow of direct investment, seasonally adjusted, from 2009 to 2019. In 2019 the volume was –US$990,350 million, and in 2020 it was –US$5,767 million.

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Figure 2.

U.S. financial transactions without current-cost adjustment in Brazil, seasonally adjusted, 2009–2020 (data from https://www.bea.gov/international/di1usdbal September 22, 2022).

On the same occasion as Ross’s visit to Brazil, Amcham Brasil (2019) presented 10 proposals considered by Brazilian business figures as priorities in the relationship between the two countries. Other meetings had similar agendas and sought to advance the bilateral agenda, including the trade dialogue meetings between Brazil and the United States held in 2019 and 2020 in an effort to advance a bilateral economic and trade partnership between the two countries (USTR, 2020a). Amcham Brasil, which represents more than 5,000 Brazilian and North American companies, developed proposals for a more ambitious bilateral partnership that, admittedly, would mean longer-term regulation. These proposals included a free-trade agreement between Brazil and the United States starting with negotiations on nontariff terms. Brazilian business people interested in a special relationship, taking advantage of this policy window, sought short-term measures. The entities representing entrepreneurs—Amcham, CNI, and the Brazil–United States Business Council—sent a letter systematizing the demands to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), the National Economic Council, and the ministries of the economy and foreign affairs (U.S. Chamber of Commerce et al., 2020). At no time did they take into consideration the opposition of the social movements, political parties, and nongovernmental organizations to the impact of these proposals.

The proposal of a free-trade agreement with Brazil was the subject of an agreement on trade and economic cooperation (USTR, 2020a). Whereas a broad agreement would have included investment, trade facilitation, competition rules, labor rights, intellectual property, environment, human rights, etc. (Lima-Campos and Gaviria, 2018), these associations pursued one of more limited scope, more of a short-term mini-deal that "would serve as a building-block for a potential FTA [free-trade agreement] in the longer term" (Neto et al., 2020). The protocol that was signed in October 2020 updated the agreement and dealt with customs administration and trade facilitation, good regulatory practices, and anticorruption measures (USTR, 2020b). These associations believed that by working sequentially they could achieve results using an incremental logic and that a possible free-trade agreement would evolve into a comprehensive agreement that was the final objective. The agenda for negotiations between Brazil and the United States proposed by the trade associations depended not only on tactics and negotiating styles or even on the declared common interests of the heads of state but on the influence of asymmetrical relations. Bargaining power depended on state action to achieve a balance and significant trade-offs and on institutional stability and reliability.

Schreiber (2020) writes that the strategy of a limited agreement also aimed at avoiding the need for bringing any agreement before Congress and bypassing any conflict with Mercosur rules. Despite excluding tariff issues, the October 2020 protocol ended up generating a worsening of relations with Brazil’s Southern-trade-bloc partners. A specific trade agreement with the United States weakened the traditional Brazilian policy of privileging multilateralism and the South American continent. The negotiations were questioned by the U.S. Congress. In June 2020, Democratic representatives on the Ways and Means Committee addressed a letter to Ambassador Robert Lighthizer of the USTR stating their opposition to any economic agreement with Bolsonaro’s Brazil (Neal, 2020):

We write to share our strong objections to pursuing a trade agreement or expanded economic partnership with Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro. . . . We consider it inappropriate for the Administration to engage in economic partnership discussions of any scope with a Brazilian leader who disregards the rule of law and is actively dismantling hard-fought progress on civil, human, environmental, and labor rights.

Brazilian credibility has been questioned since Rousseff’s impeachment because of the ensuing instability. In the first two years of Bolsonaro’s term, as a result of the Amazon rain forest fires, Democratic senators from the United States spoke out against the Brazilian president’s stance (Schatz and Murphy, 2020), and then-candidate Joe Biden declared that he would be willing to apply sanctions if Bolsonaro did not adopt measures to protect the environment.

Despite its not being an issue raised in these negotiations, the idea of reducing tariff barriers and access to the U.S. consumer market has historically been a main point of the Brazilian agenda. What emerged as a novelty in 2019 was the government’s belief in the priority of improving relations with the United States and the Trump administration at any cost. One example of this was the unilateral expansion and renewal of the U.S. ethanol import quota, which directly benefited U.S. producers and for which the United States failed to open up its market to Brazilian sugar despite sugar quotas’ having been raised by the domestic dairy industry lobby to the benefit of several other countries. Another example was the creation of a quota for U.S. wheat, which was criticized by producers in Rio Grande do Sul and negatively affected Brazil’s relations with Argentina. Even given Brazil’s subservience, Trump and the USTR continued to employ defense mechanisms against Brazilian exports, in particular with regard to steel and aluminum. Alleging that Brazil was purposely devaluing its currency in October 2020, the U.S. government adopted an antidumping measure against it. Using other justifications, it also took measures against other aluminum-exporting countries (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2020).

The primary objective of the policy undertaken by the Bolsonaro cabinet was to improve relations with the United States in an attempt to maximize the possible policy window generated by two presidents sharing certain identity-related elements. This was accompanied by and supported by the trade associations. Trump, supported by his favorable asymmetric position, made no promises on tariff reduction or further market opening. Whether any of the objectives of the demanding Brazilian agenda were achieved would depend on the priority given to U.S. interests.

Final Considerations

In response to the questions set out in the introduction, our analysis suggests the following:

1.There are divergent opinions on the possibility of extreme changes in Brazilian foreign policy. There are even greater divergences with regard to the capacity for changes to produce results of national interest. According to Hermann (1990: 5), there has been considerable change in the international orientation of foreign policy made possible by a policy window such as is described by Kingdon (1995). This in itself provides evidence of its regulatory character. This extreme change may be identified either as necessary (Araújo, 2017), as a radical break with previous positions (Casarões, 2020; Almeida, 2019; Loureiro, 2019), or as an absence of policy (in that the new direction serves the interests of a particular group [Velasco e Cruz, 2020]) or a source of chaos (Soares de Lima and Albuquerque, 2019). A strong sign of radical change in Brazilian foreign policy seen with Bolsonaro (despite its actually having begun in 2016 under Temer), which generated a break with the negotiating capacity and autonomy demonstrated in other historical moments such as the independent foreign policy of the 1960s, the responsible pragmatism of the second half of the 1970s, and the ativa e altiva [active and prominent] diplomacy of the 2000s), was its abandonment of protagonism on the international stage. In several other historical moments, its negotiating capacity had been strengthened by various means, perhaps the main one being adherence to the principles of multilateralism. Meanwhile, the argument for an extreme change in international orientation is reinforced by the cases of the trade negotiations and the Alcântara Space Center. With Bolsonaro’s inauguration there was a clear alignment of government agencies with the long-term demands of the trade associations, especially within the USTR, despite the opposition’s being represented, in part, by Congress members and on other fronts.

2. What gains were expected from this change depended on the Weltanschauung from which one started. The Bolsonaro administration’s argument in 2019 and 2020 was that closer ties with the United States were important because of their potential benefits. The objective was to position Brazil as a country that adhered to the rules of the developed countries and thereby attracted more investment, reinforcing its demands for greater incorporation into global value chains and membership in the OECD. To this end, the Bolsonaro administration promoted the trade associations’ idea of a trade agreement. However, given Brazil’s institutional instability and the instability produced by the Trump administration and then his defeat in the elections, this window was closed. With a fragile economy, Brazil lost more than it gained with this agenda (Jakobsen, 2020). In a bilateral relationship without the ability to compensate for asymmetry through tangible instruments, the expectation of gains was compromised.

3. Our initial hypothesis of low reciprocity has been confirmed. Although in relative terms U.S. hegemony is being called into question by China’s growing power, an asymmetry of power has developed that is unfavorable to Brazil. By abdicating its diplomatic tradition, the Bolsonaro Administration produced subservience with nothing in return. By antagonizing China, it eliminated the possibility of increasing its bargaining power with the United States. A sequential negotiation with partial agreements such as bilateral trade can generate side effects that compromise the ability to maintain alliances and coalitions. The option of approaching the United States changed the concept traditionally used by the Foreign Ministry, which valued multilateralism as an instrument for leveraging interests and reducing asymmetries (Mercosur, the BRICS, IBAS, G-77, etc.)

Through its subservience, Brazil’s demanding agenda in the 2019 and 2020 policy window compromised its bargaining power and resulted in direct losses. The case studies presented reflect the risks of a strategy that opts for unilateral concessions in a context where there are no real counterparts. U.S. investment in Brazil decreased significantly from 2016 on, signaling a development independent of the crisis that began in March 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. With Biden, the political relationship between the two countries changed significantly. Their positions in the international structure explain the extreme difficulty for Brazil and other dependent countries of changing their relationships when unilateral alignment is made a priority. In situations of underdevelopment, efforts to reproduce forms of social, productive, and technological organization, alongside the ideas of those who have the capacity for innovation and concentration of means, only increases the gap between states. The possibility of changing these structural relations is related to the capacity of elites in dependent countries to act under an agenda and to the international mobilization of civil society.