Despite its struggles with the middle-income trap over the past three decades, Brazil ~ the ‘B’ in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China) bloc founded over a decade ago ~ has an important role to play in the evolving international order against the backdrop of the rise of China. As Latin America’s premier military and economic power, Brazil understandably wants to increase its global heft and aspires to follow an autonomous strategic and foreign policy. But before it can do so, it has to work out its terms of engagement with its northern neighbour and the world’s pre-eminent power, the USA.

Simultaneously, moves in Washington to pull Brazil into an anti-China coalition must be eschewed. Bruce Jones, Sophia Hart, and Diana Paz García of the Brookings Institute in a new paper argue that US policymakers will have to come to terms with recognising that an autonomous Brazil can help advance a stable international order. When Brazilian President Lula da Silva returned to power in 2022, one of the first initiatives he undertook was to emphasise strategic autonomy and an independent foreign policy in the context of emergent, and intensifying, Sino-US competition. This was apparent in Mr Lula’s actions ~ the effort to carve a leading role for Brazil in peace negotiations around the Ukraine war; his official visit to Beijing; his statement about the alleged American role in encouraging the war in Ukraine; and ensuring the election of former President Dilma Rousseff to the position of president of the BRICS’ New Development Bank, the most important non-Western ordering institution, at a moment when Washington is seeking to defend the existing order. These were markers that underlined how Brazil saw the world, which is clearly not through an American lens.

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But, as Jones and his colleagues point out, Brazil also welcomed the US decision to provide $500 million to the Amazon Fund; the Lula administration worked closely with the Joe Biden administration to establish alignment between Brazil and the USA at the International Atomic Energy Agency in the face of Chinese efforts to frustrate the Australia-UK-USA agreement on nuclearpowered submarines; and President Lula was an active participant in the G-7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan, where he was a special invitee. Brazil is clearly intent on resurrecting its profile as the most important country in Latin America and a significant player in global affairs. President Lula’s timing could not have been better as great power rivalry is playing out in every region of the world including the western hemisphere. As the 10th largest economy and seventh most populous country in the world, Brazil can emerge as an important partner for other liberal, democratic middle powers such as India that are broadly US-inclined but retain the right to engage with China and with other countries on terms that are in keeping their respective national interests.