President Donald Trump’s Washington may be about to get the Brazil it wants, a major piece of the hemispheric puzzle falling into place for the so-called “Donroe Doctrine." Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, took 47 percent of the valid vote on Sunday to left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s 45 percent, setting up an October 25 runoff. Trump has not formally endorsed him, but a Bolsonaro win would give the U.S. its friendliest government in Brasília since the elder Bolsonaro’s, just as Washington tries to loosen China’s grip on strategic supply chains. China will look on nervously, but much of its groundwork in Brazil is already laid.
Those foundations will be tough to break, even with a Trump-friendly Bolsonaro government in power. The trade data shows why. In the first eight months of this year, Brazil exported $77.1 billion in goods to China, up 15 percent year-on-year, compared to just $24.1 billion to the U.S., down 9.7 percent.
That is a ratio of more than 3-to-1. Two-way trade with China reached $128.6 billion, against $51.4 billion with the U.S. Brazil’s soybean sales to China alone outstripped everything it sold to America.
A year earlier, the ratio was 2.5-to-1. Brazil is physically closer to the U.S. and sits in the hemisphere over which Trump is asserting American hegemony. But Brasília is, in many ways, closer to Beijing than Washington.
To be sure, a Bolsonaro victory would be a real prize for Trump. But political alignment cannot repeal economic geography. A new president can reset Brazil’s diplomatic posture in January.
He cannot, at the wave of a hand, reroute the 305 million metric tons of cargo Brazil shipped to China in those eight months. Trade on that scale doesn’t make Brazil China’s ally, though they are partnered through the BRICS bloc. But it means Beijing’s leverage depends less on who governs Brasília than on the material reality of who buys Brazil’s harvests and processes its minerals.
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