Lula's global dream

Lula da Silva's visit to Joe Biden on February 10 seemed to usher in a new era in relations between the United States and Brazil.

Lula and Biden seem to be condemned to affinity due to the domestic political context in which they must operate.

They are two presidents challenged by populist leaders who deny him legitimacy and who, at the same time, identify with each other: Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump.

But that agreement could be misleading.

Above all, if it is assumed that Lula's Brazil will have a more or less automatic alignment with Biden's United States.

In recent weeks there have been several signs that Brazil will play their own game.

For example, last Monday, his representative at the United Nations, who occupies a temporary seat on the Security Council, voted with Russia and China to launch an independent investigation into the sabotage suffered in September 2022 by the Nord Stream gas pipeline that crosses the Baltic Sea.

The resolution was defeated because it did not get the required nine favorable votes.

It had been proposed by the Russian representative, who expressed suspicions about the quality of the investigations being carried out by Sweden, Denmark and Germany.

Russia had a very strong interest in establishing an independent body to examine the problem, especially when indications are emerging that the attack was committed by some pro-Ukrainian group.

Even more explicit was the position of the Lula government during the Democracy Summit organized by Biden between Wednesday and Friday of last week.

Brazil refused to sign the declaration, especially because of a paragraph condemning Russia for crimes against humanity and mentioning Vladimir Putin as allegedly responsible for those crimes.

Lula, who was resting due to pneumonia, participated through a letter.

His diplomats explained that they would not sign the text because such disputes should be dealt with at the United Nations and not in informal forums.

Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, that is, the other Mercosur countries, which is the closest regional bloc that Brazil is part of, adhered to the declaration.

While the proclamation promoted by Biden was being discussed, a main figure of the Workers' Party (PT), Dilma Rousseff, was unanimously elected president of the Development Bank of the BRICS group, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

It was a very significant recognition to a former president who had to leave power, in August 2016, due to an

.

The three previous developments constitute the framework of an ambitious international initiative by Lula da Silva: to become the agent of a peace plan to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The first visible move in that trade occurred last week.

Celso Amorin, Lula's foreign policy adviser at the Planalto Palace, visited Moscow and Paris to probe the possibilities of this mediation.

During the trip he met with advisers to Putin and Emmanuel Macron, who is one of the main supporters of the Ukrainian Volodimir Zelensky.

The information available yesterday, when Amorin returned to Brasilia, indicated that for technical reasons he had not been able to visit Zelensky himself.

Lula's adviser's trip is part of a diplomatic sequence.

In early March, the president held a virtual conversation with Zelensky, in which he outlined his peace plan.

To understand this part of the puzzle, one must remember that Brazil was the only BRICS member to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.

At the same time, during a G20 summit in New Delhi, Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira met his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and invited him to visit Brasilia.

Lavrov will arrive in that capital on the 17th. By that date, Lula will have returned from Beijing, where he will meet Xi Jinping.

Except for the initial condemnation of the invasion, Brazil's positions are quite consistent with those of China in relation to the war against Ukraine.

For example, his government welcomed the 12-point plan drawn up by Beijing to find a way out of the war.

The purpose of Brazilian diplomacy is to start talks, even knowing that both Russia and Ukraine and their Western allies will immediately try to reinforce the attacks with the expectation of reaching a favorable outcome for their own side.

It is the perception with which Vieira and his team returned from the Security Summit that was held in Munich at the beginning of February.

The movement in Brazil corroborates Lula's vocation to relaunch his country as a visible protagonist on the international scene.

It is an ambition that is nourished by his own national tradition and, above all, by the background of the PT.

The Brazilian Foreign Ministry has always been phobic about automatically joining the ranks behind foreign leaders.

In Lula's case, that reluctance is accentuated by the anti-American or, to use his own jargon, anti-imperialist tone, of his party's worldview.

Amorin is a leading figure in crafting that vision.

There is a less theoretical reason.

The Brazilian agricultural business, which contributes like few others to the country's gross product, depends on fertilizers from its main supplier: Russia.

The unknown that will be cleared up over the weeks or months is the degree of coordination that this Lula initiative has with Biden's global strategy.

It is not the first time that Lula and Amorin imagine themselves as mediators of a conflict in a secret combination with the White House.

It's just that the previous time it came out lousy.

It was in 2009, when Lula proposed, along with Turkey, as a bridge with Iran on the nuclear issue.

Obama reproached him for that claim.

And Lula had a private letter published in which Obama himself had asked him to take over.

“We are not to blame if, after that request, Hillary Clinton overruled her boss,” the Brasilia diplomats explained then.

One of the enigmas of this new venture by the Brazilian president is how it fits into a relationship with the Biden government that began as an idyll.

There are reasons for this friendship: the Democratic administration was the one that gave the most categorical support to the quality of the Brazilian elections when Bolsonaro began to insinuate, anticipating a victory for his opponent, that they would be fraudulent.

Is Lula, as he thought he would be with Obama, a chess piece for the United States?

Or is it starting to be a new difficulty for Biden?

Should we prepare for the leak of new cards?

The story has not yet been written.

It is only interesting to point out one relevant aspect of the problem: this move by the Brazilians towards the heart of international politics occurs at a time when Washington decided to intervene more in Latin America.

The excuse is Russia's war against Ukraine.

The real objective, to try to put a stop to the Chinese advance on the region.

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