Foreign Policy and International Trade: responding to some questions
Paulo Roberto de Almeida, diplomat, professor.
Responses to questions from José Maihub
Just over a year ago, I had the pleasure of meeting, virtually, and becoming friends with a young intellectual, José Maihub, who has a solid eclectic educational background. He interviewed me following an essentially personal, semi-biographical-intellectual script. The recorded testimony is available on YouTube under the title “Diplomatic Conversations: Paulo Roberto de Almeida’s Journey to Itamaraty,” according to the record I made at the time:
4983. “Interview with José Maihub,” Brasília, June 10, 2025, 2 pp. Questions prepared for the interview recorded online on July 2, 2025, from 2:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., available from July 11, 2025, on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lonmB0ZTvr4). Announced on the Diplomatizzando blog (link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2025/07/entrevista-com-jose-maihub-paulo.html; reposted on January 1, 2026; link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2026/01/entrevista-com-jose-maihub-paulo.html). List of Published Works No. 1614.
By mid-2026, José Maihub contacted me again for a new interview, this time presenting some written questions, which I will try to answer as best I can, albeit briefly. What follows, therefore, are the questions and my tentative answers.
1) In our previous interview, we discussed at length the importance of the figure of Oswaldo Aranha, both in the domestic context and in the realm of international politics. For our English and American readers, as well as those from other countries, what was the significance of Oswaldo Aranha, particularly with regard to relations with what we call the Global North?
During the turbulent 1930s, serious challenges to Brazil's national interests, as well as to the autonomy of its foreign policy, were posed to the nation in the context not only of frictions but of conflicts among the great powers of the time: the European imperialisms, first and foremost; the fascist militarist states, secondly—Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militarist Japan, all revisionist and expansionist regimes—and, in a still restrained and increasingly isolationist stance, the American giant. There was a struggle for power, influence, and access to strategic raw materials—including oil, critical minerals, industrial inputs, and food supplies for national consumption—within a framework of the virtual paralysis of normal exchanges between countries, given the scale of the economic crisis and the virtual collapse of payment systems resulting from the Great Depression in which the world was immersed. Brazil, like other Latin American countries, was one of the nations targeted by the powers supplying manufactured goods and demanding raw materials, as well as by those seeking still-available spaces for the transfer of labor, investment capital, and other market resources.
Oswaldo Aranha, one of the leaders of the 1930 Revolution that overthrew the sclerotic regime of the “Old Republic,” had served as Minister of Justice (1930–1931), Minister of Finance (1931–1934), and ambassador to Washington (1934–1937). He resigned from the latter position as soon as he learned of the establishment of the Estado Novo dictatorship in November 1937. Even so, to prevent the government from being occupied solely by representatives of the right sympathetic to the fascist regimes, he assumed leadership of Brazilian diplomacy beginning in March 1038, where he carried out an exceptional effort to establish strong ties between Brazil and the Western democratic regimes—those of Western Europe and, above all, the United States of Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he maintained a personal relationship of mutual trust and cooperation, regardless of the Estado Novo dictator's occasional leanings toward the fascist powers.
Oswaldo Aranha decisively inserted Brazil into the inter-American conferences of the interwar period and, with courage, decided to convene an extraordinary conference of the American foreign ministers immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, with the European war already underway since September 1939 (and in China since the Japanese attacks of 1937), regarding which Brazil, following the lead of the United States, maintained strict neutrality. The conference, held in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942, immediately pledged solidarity to the nation that had been attacked—with some reservations from countries sympathetic to the Axis, such as Argentina and Chile—and launched a process that would continue throughout World War II, including the Lend-Lease Agreements, the deployment of Brazilian troops to the European theater of war, and cooperation during the final phase of the war: the Bretton Woods Conference on economic issues (1944), the Conference of Tlatelolco in January 1945 in Mexico to align the positions of Latin American countries in the postwar period, and the signing of the UN Charter in San Francisco in June of that same year. In all of these episodes, Oswaldo Aranha’s role, even after leaving the Vargas government in August 1944, was decisive in ensuring Brazil’s stance of close cooperation with the Western democracies.
Oswaldo Aranha enjoyed immense prestige among the political class and the Brazilian people, and could, for example, have been chosen president by the Constituent Congress had Getúlio Vargas not sent him to Washington precisely to eliminate that possibility. Likewise, he might have been drawn into a presidential candidacy in 1938 if the electoral process had not been sabotaged by Vargas himself through the dictatorial coup of November 1937. He might also, under an optimistic scenario, have been chosen by the dictator during the final crisis of the Estado Novo to run for the presidency, but he was passed over in favor of one of the military officers most subservient to Getúlio Vargas. He could also have run in the 1950 presidential election, but once again he stepped aside for Vargas, whom he regarded as an “older brother.” Finally, he might also have entered the 1955 race, but the atmosphere of crisis following Vargas’s suicide in 1954, along with the intense political polarization already gripping Brazil between Vargas supporters and opponents, once again kept him out of the contest. By 1960, he was already in a more weakened condition to enter another race; he died that same year, surrounded by the admiration of the majority of the Brazilian population.
My personal speculation, with due respect to all these episodes, is that Brazil—its economy, its politics, and its place in the international system—might have followed very different, more successful trajectories if Oswaldo Aranha had happened to be elevated to the presidency on one of those occasions, even though the chances were, each time, remote or extremely difficult, owing to the erratic course of the political struggle among movements and currents of opinion that were deeply opposed to one another, a situation created by the Estado Novo itself and by the eight-year dictatorship that fundamentally reshaped the national landscape.
Curiously, the name of Oswaldo Aranha, the great statesman of the Vargas era and the Republic of 1946, became part of my life even before I acquired any political or international awareness, in my early youth. In 1962, after completing primary school, I began my secondary education at the Oswaldo Aranha State Vocational Junior High School, a new model of full-time education that had recently been established in São Paulo under the Carvalho Pinto administration (1958–1962), shortly after the death of the remarkable statesman in 1960. GEVOA was fundamental to my intellectual development, just as, in the immediately preceding years, the children's library I frequented had been, even before I learned to read. Once I became literate, I eagerly devoured every book during my childhood and early adolescence. Oswaldo Aranha Junior High School led me from children's books to adult reading, taking me directly to the great masters of Brazilian social theory: Caio Prado Junior, Celso Furtado, Florestan Fernandes, and many others. This was also because my teachers had studied under those leading scholars in São Paulo, and they took us to interview the historian Sergio Buarque de Holanda and others. Half a century later, I returned to Oswaldo Aranha Junior High School to give a lecture to the students about who the great statesman from Rio Grande do Sul was, what he accomplished, and what he might have accomplished, having begun as the star of the Revolution of 1930.
My lecture can be viewed through the following presentation delivered on that occasion:
4457. “Oswaldo Aranha: A Brazilian Statesman. The Significance of His Actions for Brazilian Diplomacy, 1930–1960,” Brasília, August 15, 2023, 20 slides. Presentation and lecture, as a member of the first class of the Oswaldo Aranha State Vocational Junior High School (1962–1965), for students of the Oswaldo Aranha School; Principal Maria Maio (+55 11 99866-7448), on August 31, 2023, at 10:30 a.m.
2) I believe we both agree that Brazilian diplomacy has not been on a particularly sound path for quite some time. However, we are now presented with a significant opportunity in the form of a historic agreement between the European Union and Mercosur. In your view, is there room for optimism in this scenario?
PRA: Yes, and no. The Mercosur–EU agreement was finally signed after 20 years of deadlock in the negotiations—and much of the delay was due to the PT, which in 2005 decided to torpedo the FTAA proposed by the Americans, causing the Europeans to back away—and it has now provisionally entered into force, still pending a favorable vote in the European Parliament and a review by the European Court of Justice regarding any constitutional impediments to the terms of the agreement. This does not, however, prevent new protectionist reactions from either side. On the European side, these have already been felt in the form of environmental conditionalities and a ban on imports of Brazilian beef, on the pretext that it does not meet certain sanitary requirements. On the Mercosur side, some restrictions may possibly arise in certain industrial sectors, or there may be a continued blockage to the full inclusion of government procurement within the scope of liberalization. At the same time, the EU has also signed a trade association agreement with India and may eventually conclude a new agreement with China and other major partners in the so-called Global South.
The fact is that the dismantling of the multilateral trading system by Mr. Trump, along with the violations of political multilateralism and international law by Mr. Putin, have created very serious factors of instability and uncertainty in international relations, with the law of force once again prevailing over the force of law. There are echoes of the 1930s in the air, although a third global conflict is unlikely in light of the nuclear factor, which did not exist until the mid-20th century. China has already made it clear to Russia that it will not, under any circumstances, tolerate the use of nuclear weapons in its war of aggression against Ukraine, which already constitutes a reassuring factor amid the current turbulence generated by two autocrats who disdain international law.
Under these circumstances, Brazil needs to strengthen itself economically, which means overcoming the bottleneck of low-quality mass education, a major obstacle to productivity gains and higher levels of competitiveness in the process of integrating more deeply into the global economy by adopting OECD standards for macroeconomic and sectoral policies, especially in the areas of education and public administration.
3) What are your principal intellectual references in international trade? You may include both economists and political scientists.
PRA: I began my intellectual learning in the field of economics by trying to understand Marxist economics, which in any case seemed insufficient to me, since I already understood that the countries that followed the Marxist economic prescription—socialism moving toward communism—were major failures in terms of economic and social development. During my European exile, after earning a degree in Social Sciences, I completed a master's degree in economic development policies, finishing with a dissertation on foreign trade. It was then that I studied economics more seriously, as well as trade policies, investment, and finance, examining, for example, the impact of the first oil shock (1973) on Brazil and its trade policies. That was when I began studying international trade theory, coming to reject, for example, the unequal exchange hypotheses proclaimed by developmentalist economists from the ECLAC school.
Among the economists I have most admired in the field of international trade is Paul Krugman, who, incidentally, won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his new theory of international trade; it is presented in his book Rethinking International Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990). But I also returned to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the father of the theory of comparative advantage, an advance over Adam Smith's theory of absolute advantage. My major work of historical research is The Formation of Economic Diplomacy in Brazil: International Economic Relations in the Empire (2001; 2005; 2017), much of which is devoted to Brazil's foreign trade, an area in which we have never ceased to be protectionist.
4) In recent years, a major debate has emerged over whether Brazil should pursue a more traditional diplomatic path aligned with the Western world, for example by deepening its engagement with the OECD, or whether it should instead prioritize greater involvement with the BRICS in order to align more closely with China. In your view, given your extensive experience, what course should Brazil adopt?
PRA: I became a socialist at an early age, but I also abandoned the economic illusions of socialism very early on, first embracing a kind of light socialism, and later adopting much of the prescription of social liberalism—that is, a liberal economic orientation tempered by social inclusion policies based on strengthening public education in the early stages of schooling through high-quality instruction. This is the only way to truly develop the nation.
In the field of international economics, I also came to prioritize economic openness and trade liberalization, with full integration into the international economy. It seems obvious that the best way—though not the only one—to achieve sound macroeconomic and sectoral policies is to follow an OECD-style pattern of economic development, even though China has pursued a somewhat different path. It is also a market economy, but one in which the state plays a major guiding role. Yet it is clear that the Chinese cultural tradition—which early on gave rise to a kind of “Weberian state,” based on the rigorous selection of mandarins, that is, public officials engaged in public administration through merit and dedication—greatly helped China in the post-Mao reconstruction of its economy. Although China is governed by a Leninist party, it is in fact a high-quality technocracy refined over decades, during which Marxism played only a very superficial role with respect to the population as a whole, which has remained deeply devoted to hard work and eager to restore the former prestige of the Middle Kingdom, which for centuries was an economy and a society that was highly developed by comparison with European standards before the scientific and industrial revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
BRICS is a diplomatic Frankenstein that serves primarily the national political interests of the two great autocratic empires of the present day, but it does not constitute, strictly speaking, a model of society and governance suited to Brazil’s needs—a society firmly committed to a Western democratic model. The bloc may offer Brazil some specific opportunities, but it cannot, or at least should not, be the centerpiece of its international engagement, especially since Brazil ends up shaping part of its diplomatic posture around the interests of Russia, a repeated violator of international law and one of the main causes of the current geopolitical instability.
5) In your view, Professor Paulo Roberto de Almeida, are we witnessing a new “end of history”? In other words, are we facing a failure of political liberalism, rather than of socialism, as suggested in Fukuyama’s classic thesis?
PRA: The “end of History” is an interesting academic debate, but it has little to do with the actual evolution of national political formations and the general patterns of governance throughout the real historical development of concrete societies. There is no failure of political liberalism, since it constitutes an ideal model of political governance, which does not always correspond to the actual trajectory of modern and contemporary societies. Alongside institutional factors that may develop in the political trajectory of certain states—generally those within the civilizational arc of the European Enlightenment—there are also other contingent factors linked to the “passions and interests” of political leaders, to use the title of one of Albert Hirschman's books. In fact, for an excellent book on political sociology about the divergent paths of democracy and dictatorship in major societies over the past centuries, I would recommend reading Barrington Moore Jr.'s Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World.
Regarding Francis Fukuyama's thesis—do not forget the question mark at the end of his article's title—I wrote an article years ago discussing this issue: “The End of History, by Fukuyama, Twenty Years Later: What Remains?” (Brasília, January 13, 2010, 15 pp. Reflections on Francis Fukuyama's thesis and the end of alternatives to liberal market economies.) Published in Meridiano 47 (no. 114, January 2010, pp. 8–17; Academia.edu:https://www.academia.edu/5949002/2101_O_Fim_da_Historia_de_Fukuyama_vinte_anos_depois_o_que_ficou_2010_).
6) In your article “Da Geopolítica da Desordem à Opção pelo Caos: um ano de destruição da ordem mundial”, published in Será?, you refer to three “Napoleons.” Who are these three figures? Furthermore, how do the insights of Raymond Aron continue to provide valuable tools for a more cautious and nuanced interpretation of foreign policy?
PRA: The three Napoleons correspond to the three autocrats leading today's powerful empires: Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, and Trump of the United States, the latter an autocrat with a fixed term within which to complete his project of dismantling American democracy, which will prove resilient enough to prevent the United States from becoming a true autocracy.
Raymond Aron remains relevant to the discussion not only of the dilemmas of peace and war in the contemporary world, but also of the challenges of maintaining democratic regimes under the pressure of economic, political, demographic, and cultural factors—today even more acutely because of advances in communications and transportation in a truly globalized world. One of my books was conceived with reference to his posthumously published work, Les Dernières Années du Siècle (1983), namely: The First Years of the Twenty-First Century: Brazil and Contemporary International Relations (2002).
7) Looking back on your intellectual and diplomatic career, what do you feel most proud of?
PRA: I came from an extremely modest background, within my family environment, and I essentially developed myself as a committed autodidact, a “bookworm” who learned a great deal from books at first, then through travel and constant study, culminating in the full range of academic degrees earned through great effort and dedication. Regardless of a diplomatic career that occupied me professionally for more than four decades, I can say that I have essentially been a teacher—someone who studied, read, and taught throughout life—and I take great pride in that. I can also say that I willingly give back to society everything I have received from it in terms of learning opportunities: formally, through educational institutions; practically, through the performance of my diplomatic duties; and academically, through scholarly pursuits. My work is widely disseminated and freely available through my information channels.
Professor Paulo Roberto de Almeida, I would like to express my sincere gratitude for our intellectual exchanges and for your extensive body of work. It is an honor to have the opportunity to speak with you once again.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 5416, July 30, 2026, 8 p.
