Thread by @OliverStuenkel

While Bolsonaro has long projected himself the most pro-American leader in Brazil's history, the past months have revealed that Brazil's president was not a US ally, but actually a Trump ally. In fact, Bolsonaro is, in many ways, profoundly anti-American. 🧵👇

Bolsonaro was not the first Brazilian president to propose moving closer to the US. Previous leaders, too, sought to utilize proximity to Washington for personal political gain at home. Vargas, Castello Branco and Goulart all saw a US partnership as a way to buy domestic support.

Castello Branco, in particular, attempted to establish an alliance with the United States to consolidate Brazil's military dictatorship after the 1964 coup. It didn't work and US-Brazil ties entered a period of crisis until Brazil democratized in the 80s.

Bolsonaro's US strategy produced some results - Brazil is now a major US non-NATO ally, the Alcantara Base Agreement, trade facilitation - but they are little more than collateral effects of Bolsonaro's strategy to use proximity to Trump to consolidate his authoritarian project.

Trump's usefulness to Bolsonaro was obvious: a populist with authoritarian tendencies governing the US helped him legitimize his own authoritarian ambitions.

Furthermore, with the world absorbed by dealing with Trump's destabilizing int'l strategy, Bolsonaro could swim in the United States's slipstream, and pursue his radical foreign policy (anti-UN, denying climate change), meant to mobilize his base, without paying much of a price.

Now that Trump is leaving the White House, it has become obvious that Bolsonaro's strategy was never pro-American, but actually pro-Trump. With Trump gone, being close to the US is no longer useful to Bolsonaro's populist-authoritarian project. Indeed, Biden is a threat to it.

The reaction of both Bolsonaro and his Foreign Minister Araújo to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 -- basically supporting the invaders --, and their frequent rhetoric about supposed voter fraud in the US reveals they were rooting for the death of US democracy.

Indeed, as Bolsonaro prepares for reelection in 2022, it seems certain that he'll consistently embrace conspiracy theories about supposed voter fraud in the US to undermine public confidence in the Brazilian election system. The fact that US-Brazil ties will suffer is secondary.

As Bolsonaro, his son Eduardo and Foreign Minister Araújo (the 3 leading foreign policy decision-makers) have made clear, Trumpism will live on in Brazil and they will actively maintain ties to groups in the US that are working to undermine the Biden administration.