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| Professor Tom Long (Credit: Marta Sainz) |
Eduardo Sartorato
A real foreign policy, less ideologic and that prioritizes the Brazilian interests. It is the professor of the University of Warwick Ph.D. Tom Long's receipt for the foreign affair of Jair Bolsonaro's administration. Author of the book Latin America Confronts the United States: Asymmetry and Influence, he is a researcher with many published works about the relation between Latin American countries and the worldwide great powerful nation. In this exclusive interview with the Brazilian newspaper O Popular, Tom Long talks about this relationship days before the US Elections and analyses Bolsonaro's foreign affairs within Latin America
President Donald Trump has visited just one Latin American country during his term until now. It was Argentina for a G20 summit. In your opinion, how can we summarize the relationship between his administration with Latin America?
Trump has had no coherent policy approach to Latin America. That's not inherently bad, given that the idea of one-size-fits-all policies for the region have had many defects. The greater problem is that there has not been a very coherent approach to subregions or individual relationships, either. Trump's policies have been driven by three key issues. The most important, by far, has been immigration. The restrictionist, nativist immigration policies--entirely domestic in inspiration--conditioned some of Washington's most important relationships for much of Trump's term. Nowhere was this clearer than in Mexico, where demands for cooperation on migration overshadowed even counternarcotics policy and threatened to undermine one of the United States' most valuable economic relationships. Central America was seen almost entirely through the jaded lens of anti-migrant policies. However, while this issue was the top concern for the Trump administration and for Mexico and Central America, it had much less impact on Brazil and South America.
The second issue is the escalating dispute between the United States and China. Preferences within the administration regarding China and the trade war were somewhat more divided, but few in the administration questioned the 'hegemonic presumption' that Latin America should align with the United States. We saw this early on in the rhetorical embrace of the Monroe Doctrine--declared dead by John Kerry a few years earlier--and in growing warnings over Taiwan and about 'debt traps' from China. To some degree, the end of the commodities boom might have created space for Washington to re-assert leadership in the economic sphere in South America vis-a-vis China, but there was no coherent plan from Trump to do that. Instead, there were admonishments and warnings, but without new ideas about how South America could improve its growth in a more sustainable way that depended less on Chinese demand for primary goods.
The third issue was, of course, Venezuela. Here there was a lot of heat, but not much light. The administration was surprisingly successful getting countries on its side regarding the recognition of Guaidó, but it quickly became clear that it had overestimated its leverage within Venezuela. After playing its two most important cards--recognition and oil sanctions--it didn't have much left. So, the tone remained acrimonious, but the issue became more of a litmus test than an actual policy. There was no strategy, no idea about where to go after the initial gambit failed to oust Maduro. From the beginning, like with migration, this policy was driven by appeals to a slice of the Republican Party. As decades of relations with Cuba show, when the United States makes foreign policy to placate a small slice of the electorate (and donors), the policy can be disastrous but still durable.
Beyond those three issues, engagement was limited and highly transactional. Trump was happy to receive Bolsonaro's admiration, but what did he deliver? Colombia's Duque was careful not to cross Trump but was criticized over coca anyway. Meanwhile, AMLO made bargains on the backs of Central American migrants to preserve policy space and keep trade moving.
If Donald Trump wins the election and receive more one term, do you think there will be any changes in this relationship?
I wouldn't expect major changes in a second term. The three issues will be exacerbated, and domestic politics will continue to dominate Trump's Latin American policy. It's going to be very difficult to walk back the trade disputes with China, so I think this will be leveraged as a litmus test, too. Trump's foreign policy will demand an adversary and China will be the most obvious, and one where Trump can garner some support. Trump will keep pressure on Venezuela and Cuba because doing otherwise would admit defeat and because his South Florida supporters expect it. But it is very hard to imagine a broad, cooperative endeavor that would define US-Latin American relations in a second term because Trump's foreign policy is inherently skeptical of long-term cooperation and multilateralism. Without that, the benefits for South America are limited.
And how about Joe Biden? What do you expect from his term about Latin America?
Biden would provide an immediate change in tone and a very big change in substance for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. The changes for South America--with partial exceptions of Colombia and Venezuela--would be smaller. The reason for the change in substance is, first, due to migration. A big part of Biden's coalition will push for immigration reform. They might not get 'the whole enchilada,' as Vicente Fox once proposed. But they will certainly get a less punitive approach to the border and to asylum claims, and a more cooperative approach to migration management with Mexico and parts of Central America. The difficulty for Biden is that his potential partners in Central America--especially Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras--do not inspire much confidence. Still, Biden will be eager to turn the page on Trump-era headlines of family separation and children in cages. Similarly, I think we'd see a rapid return to the Obama policies on Cuba, though these will require some negotiation due the change in government in Cuba since then. And Cuba's will be understandably skeptical, having just seen the rapprochement upended by Trump. That said, like with migration, this is not going to be a total reversal. The Biden policy will accept the premise that the embargo has failed, but it is likely to maintain the same long-term goal implicitly, that is, democratization in Cuba. But you can expect to see Obama administration officials who supported that policy change to return to positions of influence.
In broad terms, I don't think South America will get a lot of attention early in the term. Biden's first year will be consumed by responding to the public health crisis, first, and responding to the economic fallout in the United States, secondly. In foreign policy, there will be greater emphasis on multilateralism--especially support for the Paris Accords and the WHO. Those represent the international dimensions of two top priorities for key Democratic constituencies. There will be greater openness to humanitarian and economic assistance to South America in its own recovery from the pandemic; this would be a great time for a unified South America push for regional leadership and an expanded response from the IDB. But that very coordination disappeared entirely under pressure for Trump over the Claver-Carone appointment.
Because Biden will be domestically focused, and because his administration will generally be more open to cooperative solutions, I think there might be a genuine window for South America to advance its own projects and reshape elements of the relationship. On the one hand, recent events regarding Unasur, Venezuela, and the IDB do not inspire a great deal of confidence. More positively, Escazú could suggest a model for engagement on climate. Certainly there is pent-up demand for changing the regional approach to the 'drug war,' and substantial elements of the Biden coalition are also skeptical of the domestic consequences of militarizing counternarcotics. The question is, where might that leadership come from within the region today?
How do you see the new Nafta agreement, and how can it transform the relationship between Mexico and the USA? Is this new agreement the reason for the changes in the president Lopes Obrador acts (he was Mr. Trump's criticizer, but reshaped his speech, including a visit to Washington last July)?
Mexico will be crucial for Biden policies, and I think this is perhaps the most promising area for cooperation. Only a little of that has to do with the USMCA (or NAFTA 2.0). Frankly, the USMCA did not change that much. The most important thing about it was that it allowed Trump to claim victory; after the agreement, he basically stopped threatening to end NAFTA. Even though AMLO emerged as a fierce critic of NAFTA, he is aware that its end would cause a major crisis in Mexico. I think his changed rhetoric about Trump preceded the agreement, and indeed was a way to protect the economic relationship. AMLO has been more pragmatic than nationalistic in his relationship with Trump. Above all, he has tried to insulate Mexican domestic politics from Trump's interventions, even when he had to pay a high price at the border for doing so. Frankly, Central American migration is not particularly popular within Mexico, so he made a rather Machiavellian calculation.
In a sense, repelling Biden will be more difficult because the Biden administration would have more sincere and cooperative interests with Mexico. It is also more likely to care about human rights in Mexico, which isn't something AMLO wants to discuss internationally. The opportunities to improve the relationship are immense, but AMLO will be hesitant about inviting the US too deeply back into Mexico's affairs. He does not want to repeat the deep level of penetration of the security sphere that occured under Felipe Calderón for example. The recent US arrest of top Mexican general Salvador Cienfuegos makes that evident. Biden will need to respect AMLO's red lines; if he does so, the two should be able to find greater commonality in multilateral forums.
We have been noticing in Brazil that president Jair Bolsonaro has been a great Donald Trump's supporter in multilateral forums, but our impression is that Trump does not give support back to Bolsonaro. Do you agree that the relation between Brazil and the USA has been unbalanced in the last two years?
Trump does not care about Bolsonaro; Bolsonaro seems to care quite a bit about Trump. This exacerbates the power asymmetry that already characterizes the US-Brazil relationship, and indeed makes it more unbalanced. Clearly, the two have some similarities in their approaches to international relations, but Trump's position means that his actions had really large and immediate effects. Bolsonaro's denunciations of globalism matter at the margins, and his forays onto the global stage have been unconvincing but also pretty inconsequential. On the regional level, though, Brazilian leadership is missed. The fact that the US has not coherent leadership project in South America means that transactionalism has been dominant. That puts Brazil and the rest of the countries in the region in a pretty weak position with the United States, and it makes it very hard for them to shape the agenda.
If Joe Biden is elected on 3rd November, some analysts in Brazil argue that Jair Bolsonaro should change his foreign policy under the risk of isolation. Do you agree?
Certainly, livestreaming himself watching Trump and retweeting Trump wouldn't help with a Biden administration! Rather than say Bolsonaro will need to change his foreign policy, I think he would need to develop a real policy--one that clearly defines Brazil's interests and not just his own and enunciate relationships between states and not just leaders and governments. Again, there's going to be very little high-level attention to South America in early part of a Biden administration, so Brazil should use that time to rebuild its regional relationships on a less ideological basis. This moment of relative inattention from the United States--but with a potentially more cooperative administration--provides a brief window to enunciate Brazilian and South American priorities and develop new policy ideas on health cooperation and pandemic response, post-commodity boom international insertion, counternarcotics, and environmental policy. Lots of people in Washington will be pushing their own ideas on all of these, so gaining some degree of regional coordination is key if Brazil wants to move the needle. But if Bolsonaro isn't inclined to go that route--and it's not obvious that he is--I'm sure he will find Trump's old State of the Union speeches on YouTube.
(This interview was originally published in Portuguese on the Brazilian newspaper O Popular. To access this version, please click here)
