Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro offers the hope of a new Latin American government that will partner with the Trump administration to stymie the influence of socialist regimes in the region and back Trump’s pro-Israel, anti-Iran push in the Middle East, according conservatives.
“It is an important, maybe watershed, moment,” James Roberts, a Heritage Foundation research fellow, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s very positive, I think, for Brazil. It’s positive for Latin America and, I think, for U.S.-Brazil relations.”
Bolsonaro’s rise, in light of his history of inflammatory rhetoric, has renewed the Left’s worries about the decline of liberal values and the rising tide of international populism around the world. But the end of the Cold War left the world divided less along ideological lines and more into camps of kleptocratic states opposed to states governed by the rule of law.
As a result, Bolsonaro’s anti-corruption campaign could provide a beachhead for cooperation with the U.S. on a range of counterintuitive foreign policy issues in the region.
“Pro-Iranian position? It’ll change,” the president-elect’s son, Eduardo, told Bloomberg. “Our side is being against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic State.”
Those comments promise a challenge to an important, but often overlooked, threat of Iranian terrorism in the Western Hemisphere.
“Iran has vastly expanded its presence in South and Central America, opening new missions and populating them with far more people than required for normal diplomatic duties,” Matthew Levitt, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote in 2012. “Iran’s increased presence in the southern half of the Western Hemisphere presents a clear and present danger to U.S. security.”
Bolsonaro may also follow President Trump’s lead in moving the Brazilian Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a sign of solidarity that Trump would welcome.
“Every major country that embraces Israel and/or moves the embassy is an enormous deal,” a senior Senate Republican aide told the Washington Examiner. “There is also a more subtle dynamic of a BRICS country being one of the countries that are doing it. … There are now two of the BRICS countries that are [pro-Israel].”
In other words, Brazil is joining India as one of the five major emerging market “BRICS” societies — the other three are Russia, China, and South Africa — to adopt pro-Israel polices. That’s a major point of concord with a U.S. government that wants trade relationships with those developing economies and a long-term partnership to counter Russian and Chinese aggression.
Those possibilities were evident even in the sparse summary of Bolsonaro’s phone call with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“The Secretary congratulated Mr. Bolsonaro on his win and reinforced the vibrant partnership between the United States and Brazil based on our mutual commitment to promote security, democracy, economic prosperity, and human rights,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a Monday bulletin. “They discussed collaboration on priority foreign policy issues including Venezuela, countering transnational crime, and ways to strengthen economic ties between the United States and Brazil, the two largest economies in the Western Hemisphere.”
Talk of democracy and human might seem unreasonably optimistic for a man who said in 1999 that he would “perform a coup” if elected president. “The Congress today is useless,” he said, according to the New York Times. “Lets do the coup already. Let’s go straight to the dictatorship.”
He said in 2016 that “the dictatorship’s mistake was to torture but not kill,” according to USA Today. He has also made an array of misogynistic comments, telling a political adversary that she was “not worth raping” and joking that he had a daughter after having four sons due to “a moment of weakness.”
But Bolsonaro more recently has pledged that his government “will be slaves to our constitution,” according to The Guardian. And he has made clear his hostility to one of the most troublesome dictatorships in the region.
“You need to play tough with Venezuela,” the president-elect’s son, Eduardo, told Bloomberg while calling for elections in the crisis-wracked country. “If [elections are] not possible, international sanctions.”
Venezuela’s descent into chaos has jolted Brazil and its neighbors with an influx of refugees, contributing to the backlash that propelled Bolsonaro to victory. Similarly situated politicians in other countries, such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, have startled Western leaders with their subsequent outreach to Russia; nationalists who ride immigration fears to power tend to share Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aversion to international institutions such as the European Union.
And yet, there are preliminary signs that Russia views Bolsonaro skeptically. Kremlin-run media greeted his victory with speculation that he “could take part in a military operation against the Venezuelan government” at the behest of the United States. TASS, Russia’s state-run news outlet, quoted a Brazilian foreign policy expert who warned that “it’s high time he [Bolsonaro] understood the role of China and BRICS today.”
TASS emphasized that “one of BRICS key goals is developing a global financial system, which will be independent from the current institutions relying on the dollar.”
That reaction aligns with Roberts’ expectation that Bolsonaro will help thwart Russian inroads into Latin America, especially in Venezuela.
“It’s obvious that they really feel threatened,” the Heritage expert told the Washington Examiner. “Putin has made big inroads in Venezuela with regards to oil deals and if these sweetheart deals go sour. … They know that Bolsonaro will not be a toady for Putin.”
That goes for China, as well, which has been using economic investments and “bribes to senior leaders” to conduct “a treasury-run empire build,” as Pompeo recently described the Chinese international spending spree.
“To have another ally against that kind of spreading cronyism and corruption will be great, I think, for both countries,” Roberts said. “And for other countries in the region.”
