After Two Years of Acrimony, Brazil and U.S. Move to Reset Ties
After Two Years of Acrimony, Brazil and U.S. Move to Reset Ties
Good intentions are a starting point, but both Washington and Brasilia must deliver results, writes COA’s Eric Farnsworth for World Politics Review.
Both the Brazilian and U.S. governments billed President Dilma Rousseff’s late June meeting with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in Washington as a reset of relations between the Western Hemisphere’s two largest democracies. Revelations in 2013 by NSA contractor Edward Snowden of U.S. eavesdropping on Brazilian officials, including Rousseff herself, caused her to cancel her state visit scheduled for that October, putting bilateral relations on ice for almost two years.
Arguably, Brazil and the United States had already been on separate tracks for some time prior to that, given Brasilia’s more assertively independent foreign policy under the Workers Party, first elected in 2002 under former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and a laissez-faire U.S. attitude toward the region. But coupled with China’s growing profile in Latin America, which gave Brazil new options for alignment and allowed it to work around Washington, the Snowden revelations crystalized an atmosphere of mutual frustration and mistrust between Brazil and the U.S....
