Professor Feliciano Guimarães is an outspoken man. So much so that, in a meeting with Indonesia’s number two of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “I told them that they made a strategic mistake in not entering the BRICS, in his face, with all his team, a lot of ambassadors around, they made a strategic mistake”.
Guimarães is a Professor of International Relations at the University of São Paulo, Latin America’s top-ranked University. He’s also a senior fellow at CEBRI, an independent think tank contributing to Brazil’s foreign policy. Having advised many Brazilian diplomats, and, well, criticised some foreign others to their faces, Mr. Guimarães is a highly respected influence on the subject in Brazil. He sat with BGTN for an exclusive interview at his office at the University’s campus and dived into the most relevant aspects of Brazil and the rest of BRICS.
BRAZIL’S DIPLOMATIC GOALS WITH BRICS
When the BRICS was created, in 2009, the world was becoming more multipolar and maybe BRICS was a symbol of this new multipolarity. Brazil was part of a movement to create a multipolar order. This is the number one priority of Brazil. But there is a second reason for that, which is China, Russia and India. These three very important countries came to Brazil and said “look we are going to create this coalition and we are going to give you Brazilians at the highest level, president to president, prime minister to president, in a way that the West has never offered to you”. And why would we say no to an offer like that? The Chinese, the Russians and the Indians, they say, “look, we’re going to sit together every year, three, four times a year.
We’re going to assign memoranda, we’re going to assign cooperation agreements, and these will trickle down to our society,to our economy and that will change the scale of our relationships. And if you look today, at the bilateral relationship between India and Brazil, for example, we have never been so close, as we are today.” And we are so close to India today because of BRICS. So BRICS was a window to access India. India is on the verge of becoming an importer of food. The economy is rising, they grow 5 or 6% every year, and they cannot produce enough food for themselves. They are traumatised by the famine that they had in the past, so they’re going to need reliable food suppliers. How many reliable food suppliers there are in the world? Brazil is one of them. So we are right there.
BRICS EXPANSION IMPACT ON BRAZIL
If you look at the official position of the Brazilian government at the BRICS expansion process in the last summit in Johannesburg, officially Brazil was against expansion. If you read the newspapers and the articles and the interviews of the Brazilian authorities back then, they are not clearly against it, but you can see between the lines that they were not so comfortable with the inclusion of other countries. Not because they disliked Saudi Arabia and Iran, Brazil does not have any political problems with these countries. But because the inclusion of new members would dilute Brazil’s influence within BRICS. But I told the authorities back then and I continue to say that, yes, this is a correct argument. I think by including new members to BRICS, Brazil’s influence within BRICS will diminish naturally because we will have a bigger coalition, but the coalition itself will become more powerful.
It’s like if you’re exchanging a loss in the short term for a gain in the long term. In the beginning we’re going to have to make some adjustments because we have the Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Ethiopia, Iran in the game.
We’re going to have some negative political consequences. No doubt about that because once you include Iran and Saudi Arabia they have the rivalry between themselves. Iran is always a complicated issue in the nuclear proliferation regime. So this is a challenge for us. In the case of Saudi Arabia and Iran, we have a very good bilateral relationship with both of them. We export a lot to Saudi Arabia, we export a lot to Iran, and we want to export more. From an economic point of view, the expansion of BRICS was positive. In the long term, it’s going to be positive for Brazil. Of course, there is always a discussion of values.
ARGENTINA NOT JOINING BRICS
I can say that Argentina has made a mistake due to American pressure into ideological preferences of President Milei. He prefers to be closer to the West. He thinks he will pay off eventually to be closer to the West and pay off to be closer to the West. I think this is a terrible mistake because it can be both. It can be close to the West and a member of BRICS, you know, and then he will have China and Russia and India and Brazil, a connection at the highest level, president to president in all the summits that you see all the time, and Argentina has made a terrible mistake. A mistake that Indonesia has done as well. Indonesia was very close to becoming a member of BRICS, and they gave up, and I think they gave up due to American pressure and also misunderstanding of what BRICS actually means.
INDONESIA NOT JOINING
I was invited to go to Indonesia, to Jakarta, but I couldn’t go too far away, so I had a meeting online, a two -hour meeting with the number two of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Indonesia and all his team, all his Latin American team, about many issues, and we discussed BRICS as well, and I was very, very clear, and I told the number two of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Secretary -General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, you made a strategic mistake in entering the BRICS, in his face, with all his team, a lot of ambassadors around, they made a strategic mistake.
He said, why? I said, I explained how BRICS is going to Brazil, and I can tell you several reasons. And I said, look, you cannot, in a world like this, you have to engage more, you cannot engage less, you cannot isolate yourself, you have to be engaging, engaging, and if you get an invitation, if the invitation is not a structural problem to you, if this invitation doesn’t come from an enemy, which is not the case of Indonesia, right? So why say no? I mean, and then you negotiate, I mean, you’re going to, all the time, negotiate with the Western and BRICS, and what if, what if? In 20 years from now, there is a war between China and the United States, and China wins, and you pick the wrong side. So this is a mistake that Brazil will never make. Ever. We are too smart to make it this time, I’m saying. And I said like that, we Brazilians, I said, we Brazilians are too smart, we will never make it.
BRAZIL’S POSITION IN THE WORLD STAGE
So I think, again, going back to you, Brazil’s unique position in the world. So we are on this side of the world. We are recognised as a part of the West by many. We will never be an ally of the West, but we are good partners of the United States. I think this is a keyword, being a partner instead of an ally. France and the United States, they’re allies. Germany and the United States, they’re allies. Brazil is not an ally. We fought in World War II. But that was at a specific moment. We are part of the OAS, the Organization of American State, with the United States. But that doesn’t mean that we are an ally of the United States. They recognise us as a reliable partner, and we recognise them as a reliable partner. So we have this bridge position, as I say.
We cannot exaggerate or underestimate Brazil’s bridge-building capacity. Because we are one of the few countries at Brics that are located right between the West and the rest of Brics. Maybe just us and South Africa, the two countries in this unique position of the world. So we have to play this game. Sometimes I tell my colleagues from the United States and Europe say, Why don’t you invite us to be a member of the G7?
Why don’t you invite Russia to be a member of the G8 after the fall of the Soviet Union? We will be a member of the G7 as well. We will never say no to that, because of the idea that Brazil has to engage as much as possible in every single international regime to protect itself. Because we are not part of NATO. We are not part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
We have no strategic alliance that protects us from global powers, or even minor powers here. So we have to design a foreign policy that protects us, first and foremost. Brazil has to come up with a sophisticated hedging strategy. A hedging strategy has a mechanism of balancing. You have to talk to the Chinese, and you have to talk to the Americans, and you have to talk to the Europeans.
And again, it’s not because Brazil is a member of BRICS, that Brazil is an automatic ally of the Chinese. So Brazil has a different geopolitical position in the world, and we have to secure this unique geopolitical situation. Brazil had always, in any diplomatic relationship, Brazil had to always seek a scenario in which we keep our options open. This is a strategic world-view of the Brazilian diplomats. Sometimes, depending on the government, this principle of autonomy will take different clothing.
BRAZIL WILL BE A GREAT EXPORTER OF GREEN ENERGY
I’d just like to add that Brazil is going to be also a great exporter of green hydrogen, right? Green hydrogen is hydrogen that is produced by green energy. The only region in Brazil that can do that is the north-east, and we have a lot of European investment, especially German investment, on the coast of the north-east in the next two years will be a great green hydrogen exporter. We are going to be a very important oil exporter and a very important green hydrogen exporter. So Brazil has a new geopolitical asset in its hands, which is energy. We never had that as a geopolitical asset. Now we have food as a geopolitical asset. We have the environment with Amazon as a geopolitical asset and sometimes a liability.
Brazil will be a supplier of energy, oil, and green hydrogen. When it comes to green hydrogen, it has a very positive connotation. When it comes to oil, it has a positive and negative connotation. Let’s say Brazil continues to export a lot of oil to China, and then Brazil will become a green hydrogen exporter to Europe. Again, you balance a little bit, you know, you don’t rely on a single partner alone. We know that Russia exports a lot of oil to China, so in this case, Brazil and Russia compete for the Chinese market. We will export a lot of oil to India, Brazil will export a lot of oil to India as well. It’s already exported, we will export more.
So there is some competition amongst BRICS countries, right, in the issue of oil. Like many other issues we have competition, right, BRICS again, going back to the discussion BRICS, is an alliance, it’s a coalition that tries to build a multipolar order to reform international institutions, and that coalition helps the bilateral relationship amongst its country.But there is a lot of geopolitical and trade competition amongst these countries. This is a normal thing, just like there is in the G7. What is missing within BRICS is the political regime. It’s the political regime equivalence, right?
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