Last week’s visit to China by the Brazilian Lula, on the heels of that of Emmanuel Macron, will have fulfilled Beijing, in that both brought grist to the mill for the major maneuvers to be book Xi Jinping to redraw the order of the world. With the unexpected Iranian-Saudi rapprochement achieved in March under Chinese auspices, we noted the rise of Beijing’s political power in international affairs, beyond its only, and otherwise aggressive, strategy of economic expansion. . So much so that by wondering out loud about their relationship with the United States and saying they are looking for a third way, President Macron and, above all, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have in fact found themselves playing the game of a Chinese dictatorship asserting itself in the face of contracting American influence and space.
Affirming that “being an ally [des États-Unis] does not mean being a vassal” and expressing his refusal to “follow his way” towards the Americans on the Taiwan question in the name of his obsession with European “strategic autonomy”, Macron was bound to upset Washington and throw a stone into the pond of the fragile unit of the Twenty-Seven, built around the war in Ukraine. A good talker, he gave the impression of acting as if, in the current violent disorder of things, there was no reason, between China and the United States, to choose sides. And to act as if European security had not passed for more than a year through massive military investment by the United States, without which Ukraine would have been crushed by Russia. His remarks were considered all the more incongruous since China had just held ostentatious military exercises to encircle Taiwan.
This does not exclude that, basically, his “obsession” is legitimate and that he said aloud what many think quietly. Who indeed wants a world reduced to a China/United States confrontation, where is imposed, while humanity is facing an environmental crisis that threatens its very survival, a cold logic of reciprocal over-militarization and new war cold, with vassalization in the key of Europe, on the one hand, and of the global South, on the other? Mr. Macron has the merit of raising the question.
Beneath his calls for peace in Ukraine and his mediating ambitions, President Lula is playing the Chinese card as clearly as possible. In a magazine interview Time in May 2022, before he became president again and turned the page on the frightening Jair Bolsonaro, he had already announced his colors by saying that “Volodymyr Zelensky was as much to blame for the Russian invasion of Ukraine as Vladimir Cheese fries “. As an untimely simplification of history and current events, it is difficult to do better.
Last week, in China, he delivered by accusing Washington of “encouraging war” in Ukraine. Exaggerated without being absolutely false, in view of the strategic interests of the Americans, his assertion would however have more value if he did not show himself to be so complacent with regard to Beijing. Isn’t it absurd that this patriarch of the Brazilian and international left spent 48 hours in China without saying a word about the flagrant violations of human rights?
Lula is not wrong to say that in the long term, the end of the armed conflict will have to go through territorial concessions on the part of Zelensky as well as Putin. Except that by vaguely proposing a joint mediation, with China in the first place, then with other members of the G20, its efforts to position itself as an arbiter, under the sign of a Brazilian tradition of neutrality in foreign policy, are necessarily lame. It remains in the background that Brazil, whose economy is fragile, has no interest in falling out with Moscow and Beijing. With Russia, because Brazilian agro-industry is heavily dependent on Russian fertilizers. With China, which is Brazil’s largest trading partner, far ahead of the United States.
The same balance of power operates within the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Lula celebrated in Beijing the inauguration of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff as head of the New Development Bank, the BRICS bank created in 2014 in opposition to the World Bank and the IMF. And he has, a great novelty, concluded with China an agreement in principle with a view to carrying out future contracts in reals and yuan – therefore, without having to go through the American currency. These initiatives are eloquent in that the approach of Brazil, a South American power with feet of clay, reveals the will of the emerging world to emancipate itself from American and Western hegemony. Nevertheless, at the same time, they allow China to deepen its domination. Between the desire to distance itself from the United States and the risk of being the useful idiot of China, the line of demarcation is thin.