What was she thinking?
It will take another five to ten years before the first more sophisticated books on the foreign policy of the Rousseff government (2011-2016) will be published. Anything written before that will inevitably suffer from a lack of sources (key foreign policy makers need to retire before they accept giving detailed accounts of their time in office). Books or articles written in the immediate aftermath will also be limited because authors are unable to evaluate the Rousseff government in the broader historical context — after all, it is impossible to know today whether 2011-2016 marks the beginning of a decades-long decline or a temporary crisis preceding a sustained upswing. Finally, historians assessing her government from a distance will not be as emotionally involved as any observer writing about contemporary affairs. That does not mean that contemporary books are not useful — far from it — indeed, they often serve as important stepping stones for historians to write more profound analyses later on.
One issue that future historians writing about Rousseff’s foreign policy will inevitably discuss is the president’s alleged lack of interest in international affairs. It was this disinterest in the topic, according to the so far dominant assumption, which goes a long way to explain Brazil’s remarkable foreign policy retreat at the time. As this author wrote for Americas Quarterly (AQ) last year,
Dilma Rousseff failed to articulate a coherent foreign policy doctrine. Brazil’s international strategy since 2011 was shaped, above all, by the president’s astonishing indifference to all things international and officials’ incapacity to convince Rousseff that foreign policy could be used to promote the government’s domestic goals. Her predecessors knew better: Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) helped establish a series of regional mechanisms to preserve democratic governance, thus reducing the number of external political crises that could hurt the Brazilian economy. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-10) (…) not only had a trusted foreign minister and a special adviser for international affairs, but also a highly active minister of defense who embraced foreign policy to promote Brazil’s interests (…).
Yet as many observations made in the heat of the moment, this assessment will, over time, gain nuance. One of the most interesting details that is beginning to emerge is that Rousseff, known to be an avid reader, was often eager to privately discuss big questions in international affairs with her ministers and advisors. She is said to have spent entire weekends reading international affairs literature, such as Henry Kissinger’s World Order (reviewed here). Rather than meeting influential congressmen or senators to solve domestic challenges, Rousseff generally retreated for days and called ministers will the sole purpose to discuss books, several of which about international affairs. As one advisor commented, Rousseff was fascinated by China’s rise, and often asked her interlocutors how they thought Beijing would affect global order.
That was contrasted, to be sure, by the President’s lack of diplomatic skills. Her famous question about the number of engineers at the Foreign Ministry during a ceremony there reflected a profound dislike of the diplomatic profession, which struck her as too abstract and hard to evaluate (perhaps she should have read Kissinger’s Diplomacy instead of World Order). The president at another point let designated foreign ambassadors wait months in Brasília for their “agrément” or approval, a fundamental protocol formality by which the sending State asks the receiving State if it will welcome the person who has been chosen as the ambassador. Rousseff also had a profound dislike of air travel, and often discussed flight routes with her pilots to avoid the light turbulence caused by clouds — hardly a useful starting point for big foreign policy initiatives.
What future historians may conclude is that the main reason for Rousseff’s dismal foreign policy record was not her lack of interest in international relations per se, but rather her highly centralizing leadership style entirely unsuited for managing a large organization, not to mention on the world’s largest nations with highly complex relations to all other countries of the globe. Extreme centralization at one point led to the bizarre situation in which her foreign minister had to submit his declarations to the media to the presidential palace before they could be published.
Arguing that the lack of interest alone was responsible for Brazil’s foreign policy malaise also presupposes a correlation between a President’s interest in a certain policy field and the implementation of successful policy. A brief look at the Rousseff government’s economic policies, however shows that this is not the case: the president had a strong interest in the economy (she even holds an economics degree), but that did not lead to smart economic policy. Quite to the contrary: Rousseff’s interest significantly contributed to her frequent and highly controversial meddling in policy making, and she is the main architect, together with her Finance Minister Mantega, of the longest recession in history. Advisors at the time commented on how Rousseff spent hours reviewing details of industrial policy that should have been delegated to specialists several levels down the hierarchy. Journalist were aghast to learn that the president interfered in minuscule decisions about the number of kilometers of piplelines or roads built in remote areas of the country. It was probably sheer incompetence and a refusal to delegate, rather than lack of interest alone, that is likely to go further in explaining what went wrong with Brazil’s foreign policy under Rousseff.
Foreign policy arguably requires a greater degree of delegation than other policy areas — hence the supreme importance of the personal trust a president has in his or her foreign minister. Its impact is also harder to measure, inevitably creating tensions with a president who liked to have everything translated into numbers. Yet Rousseff is not the only one to have struggled to understand the intricacies of foreign policy. A recent report published by a Senator critical of Lula’s foreign policy seeks to quantify the impact of each Embassy by merely looking at bilateral trade — an approach that fails to take many other highly relevant issues into account.
Rousseff’s final days in office also suggest she had a vague understanding of the importance of foreign policy. Rather than seeking to mobilize supporters at home, she traveled to New York, where she denounced Temer as a “coup-monger” on the sidelines of a UN meeting. Rousseff also broadened her (hopeless) fight for survival to regional bodies and leaders. In a clumsy and ill-conceived move, she announced she would ask Mercosur to invoke its democracy clause, arguing that a democratic rupture was underway in Brazil. From New York, Brazil’s foreign minister and special foreign policy adviser traveled directly to Quito to make Rousseff’s case at Unasur.
Future accounts of Rousseff’s foreign policy (or the lack of it) based on primary sources will not only be of academic interest. Rather, a detailed analysis of her time in office and its impact on Brazil’s global strategy may help foreign policy makers prepare for future presidents with similar characteristics, and devise strategies to preserve and protect valuable foreign policy initiatives in moments when the gulf between Planalto and Itamaraty seems unsurmountable.
Read also:
IPRI – Relações Internacionais em Pauta – Entrevista com Oliver Stuenkel
Why Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro Doesn’t Look Finished Quite Yet
