U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal to impose a 10% extra import tariff on any nation that is a member of, or working with, the BRICS nations, contrasts emphatically with the actions of the great Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt not only did not denigrate the role of developing the physical economies of the vast Global Majority; he made that a principle of the Bretton Woods that was assembled in the 1944-45 period.
On September 19, 1939, Harry Dexter White, director of Monetary Research, U.S. Treasury Department, dispatched an internal memo to his boss, Henry Morgenthau, titled ["Specific Proposals for Immediate United States-Brazil Cooperation”](Henry Dexter White Papers, at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, a division of the Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library). It is an integrated plan to develop Brazil. White organized the memo into four parts, the first few of which were to direct Hamiltonian credit to Brazil. Part III proposed a “Special credit of $100 million for [Brazil’s] purchase of railroad rolling stock supplies in the United States for reconstruction of the Brazil railroad system.”
The fourth part is a real blockbuster, building upon part three. It is titled, “The Immediate Inauguration of an Elaborate Joint Brazil-U.S. Engineering, Geographic and Economic Study of Long-Term Projects for the Development of Brazil.” This had among its many features: “1) The construction of a 1,500-mile [railroad] north and south through the interior of Brazil which would open the resources of the Brazilian plain.” The second point involved the construction of another railroad to bring iron ore deposits from the city of Itabera in São Paulo state to a waterfront, some of which would be used to feed one of the world’s largest steel mills, which the U.S. and Brazil planned to build; and “3) the construction of a railroad to connect Brazil and Bolivia.”
Some observant persons will see in this proposal the foreshadowing of the bi-oceanic railroad that Brazil is working on today with China, which will link the Brazilian port of Ilheus on the Atlantic Coast, with Peru’s Chancay megaport on the Pacific.
