Brazil and the United States: The Need for Strategic Engagement

Washington’s identification of Brazil with Latin America and the Third World hampers its appreciation of Brazil’s power and importance to the United States. It is true that Brazil is geographically part of Latin America, and it is also true that Brazil, a founder of the Group of 77, was, with India, among the original leaders of the “Third World.” But Brazil is Brazil—as large and every bit as unique as the United States or China. Brazil, for many years the seat of the Portuguese empire, is the world’s largest Portuguese-speaking country. It never had the large settled Amerindian populations that became a repressed underclass in the Andes and Mesoamerica; Brazilians today are as diverse as their North American cousins but growing faster. Brazil’s land mass is the fifth largest in the world. As in the United States, the possibility of expanding into large and relatively unpopulated territories helped to create a sense of new frontiers and optimism. Both the United States and Brazil have a dominant sense of pragmatism and a culture of solving problems and “making things work.” Both have governments capable of reaching beyond their borders, but are deeply inward-looking and characterized psychologically by a sense of their own exceptional nature (and, sometimes, by the hubris born of an excessive sense of self-worth).

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Ambassador Luigi R. Einaudi is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Center for Strategic Research, Institute for National Strategic Studies, at the National Defense University. He is also a Member of the Advisory Council of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.