President Trump wants NATO to take the next step toward partnering with Brazil as part of an effort to fortify the Western Hemisphere against Russian and Chinese encroachment.
“The next level up is association,” a senior administration official told reporters as Trump prepared to host Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for dinner at Mar-a-Lago. “The president had even mentioned about having it become a full-fledged NATO member. That’s something that would really be historic … that’s nothing I would discard.”
Any move to enhance Brazil’s standing with the trans-Atlantic alliance would have to overcome Bolsonaro’s running feud with French President Emmanuel Macron, which is anchored in a dispute over forest fires in the Amazon but degenerated into Bolsonaro mocking the French leader’s wife. Yet Brazil’s election of the anti-communist leader in 2018 elevated an important ally for U.S. efforts to address the Venezuela crisis, with potentially broader ramifications for Washington’s rivalry with Russia and China.
“There are still external actors, that, frankly, are incompatible with a lot of the values and the things that bring the entire Western Hemisphere together, meaning — being mostly, obviously, the Chinese and Russian involvement in the Western Hemisphere,” the official said.
The Kremlin and Beijing have combined to provide financial, diplomatic, and even security assistance to Venezuela strongman Nicolas Maduro. Trump and Bolsonaro are meeting at the outset of what U.S. officials are calling “maximum-pressure March” — a reference to the international crackdown that they hope will force the socialist leader to relinquish control of the government in Caracas.
“I think in the days and weeks to come, there’s going to continue to be escalation towards the maximum pressure that we seek and that we’ve set out as our policy,” the senior administration official said.
Any expansion of that partnership to bring Brazil into NATO would test the geographical definition of the security bloc, which is defined by treaty as a North Atlantic alliance. For now, the two sides have the more modest goal of “a nonmember association agreement with NATO,” for which there is already a Latin American precedent.
“In the chain, though, the next kind of level and the next step would be an association agreement, similar to what Colombia currently has,” the senior administration official said.
