Brazil's BRICS pivot — Lula's strategic ambiguity is a strategy
Lula's third-term Brazil has positioned BRICS+ membership and Western alignment as parallel hedges rather than alternatives. The 2024 G20 Rio summit illustrated the approach. Critics in both camps call it incoherent. Brazilian foreign-policy doctrine would call it 'autonomy through diversification.'
Key fact
Brazil's bilateral trade with China (2024): $157B — more than 2x its trade with the US.
Brazilian foreign policy since Itamar Franco's mid-1990s government has carried a doctrine the diplomatic corps calls *autonomia pela diversificação* — autonomy through diversification. The idea is to build multiple substantial bilateral and multilateral relationships, none dominant, all useful. Lula's third term has applied this doctrine to the BRICS-versus-G7 question with characteristic indirectness.
The data: Brazil's bilateral trade with China reached $157B in 2024, more than twice its US trade. Brazilian sovereign debt held by Chinese institutions is non-trivial and growing. The 2023 Petrobras-Sinopec exploration agreement and the Vale-CITIC iron-ore offtake renewal locked in trade structure for the next decade. From this angle, Brazil looks like a BRICS economy with growing Chinese embeddedness.
The countercurrent: Brazil's defense procurement remains US-oriented. The Embraer-Boeing C-390 transport sale to NATO members is structurally important to São José dos Campos. Brazil's IMF voting weight and Bretton Woods institutional access reflect a decades-old Western alignment that Lula has not unwound. The 2024 G20 Rio summit communiqué carried Brazilian-drafted language critical of unilateral sanctions but stopped short of any BRICS-style formal alternative to G7 frameworks.
What this produces, operationally, is a Brazilian foreign policy that is harder for Washington and Beijing to bargain with than a more straightforwardly aligned country. Brazil declines US pressure to constrain Chinese investment. Brazil declines Chinese pressure to take BRICS positions on Taiwan or Ukraine. Both capitals find this frustrating; neither has an obvious tool to change it because Brazil's economic diversification is genuine.
The critique from within Brazilian foreign-policy circles is that this doctrine works when the global system tolerates non-alignment, and fails when the system polarises. If the US-China relationship moves toward more explicit decoupling — if either capital begins to treat hedging as betrayal — Brazil's autonomy strategy becomes harder to sustain. Itamaraty has been quietly drafting contingency papers on what 'forced alignment' would look like. They have not been published. The fact that they exist is itself a signal about how the strategic question is being read in Brasília.
Oliver Stuenkel at FGV in São Paulo has argued for nearly a decade that Brazilian foreign policy has converged on what he calls multi-alignment — an active diplomatic posture that deliberately refuses bloc affiliation while engaging with every major power and regional grouping that affects Brazilian commerce and security. The 2023-2026 Lula third term has executed that posture with more deliberate language than the 2003-2010 first two terms, partly because the global system itself has hardened into competing camps that make non-affiliation more visible.
The trade composition explains most of the constraint. Brazilian exports to China — soybeans, iron ore, beef, crude oil — totaled roughly $123 billion in 2024, against $40 billion in exports to the United States and $51 billion to the European Union. China is the largest single trading partner; the United States is the largest single source of foreign direct investment; the European Union is the largest market for Brazilian manufactured exports. A doctrine of strategic ambiguity is, at a minimum, what those three facts together require. Bloc affiliation with any one of the three would force re-routing of trade and capital flows at substantial domestic political cost.
The BRICS forum is the most useful institutional space in which Brazil exercises this posture. Brasília has consistently pushed for the bloc to function as a development-finance coordination forum and a counterweight on specific IMF and World Bank governance reforms — both objectives compatible with continuing deep commercial relationships with the G7. At the same time Brasília has resisted Chinese and Russian proposals to give the bloc a harder geopolitical posture: the 2024 Kazan communiqué's softer language on Ukraine reflects in part Brazilian and Indian pushback against language Moscow had wanted.
The Russia-Ukraine question is where the multi-alignment doctrine is tested most visibly. Lula's 2023 proposal of a 'peace club' to mediate the conflict — which included China, Brazil, and other non-aligned states — was treated as both diplomatically clumsy and substantively serious in different Western capitals. The doctrine's defenders argue that maintaining channels with Moscow, even at the cost of friction with Washington, is the price of preserving the option to mediate. Its critics argue that the doctrine confuses the appearance of agency with actual influence on outcomes that the major belligerents will determine without Brazilian input.
The Mercosur-EU trade agreement, finalised in December 2024 after more than two decades of negotiation, is the test case for whether the multi-alignment posture can deliver concrete commercial wins. Mercosur's combined GDP and the EU's combined GDP together produce a trade area covering roughly 700 million people. Implementation is staged over the late 2020s and faces ratification friction in France and other agricultural-protected EU member states. If the deal survives that friction, it is the strongest piece of evidence yet that Brazilian foreign-policy ambiguity — refusing to align fully with either the China-led or US-led pole — can still produce institutional outcomes that more committed bloc-affiliators cannot. If it does not survive, the doctrine's operational ceiling becomes much clearer in the second half of the 2020s, and the political-economic costs of the ambiguity become harder to defend at the next Brazilian electoral cycle.
The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.
The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.