On the heels of the New Delhi BRICS Summit, which President Lula da Silva was unable to attend because of Brazil’s upcoming presidential election, his Special Foreign Policy Advisor, Celso Amorim, was deployed to India and China to deliver personal letters from the President to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping. To do so, Amorim held substantive meetings with Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval in Delhi (on Sept. 15) and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing (on Sept. 16).
In an interview with Brasil247 TV from New Delhi, Amorim explained that close coordination with these two fellow founding BRICS members is a key part of Brazil’s efforts to defend its “strategic autonomy” in the midst of a world in transition. “No one can speak of a unipolar world anymore,” he said, not even the United States itself, but the collapse of unipolarity has not produced an international order based on rules, cooperation, and balance among different poles. “They somehow shifted the idea of the concept of multipolarity to look at the idea of spheres of influence. And that’s really the biggest challenge we face today,” he warned.
Amorim’s meetings with Doval and Wang covered the possibilities for broadening bilateral cooperation in multiple areas with each of their countries, as well as “in-depth” discussions of the global strategic crises; specifically, the Ukraine-Russia war, the Iran situation and the Middle East conflicts, and, in the case of his meeting with Wang, Ibero-America. Naturally, collaboration through the BRICS was discussed.
China Daily reported that, in his discussions with Wang, Amorim spoke of how Brazil and China are both major countries of the Global South, and that against the backdrop of a turbulent international situation, Brazil-China relations have gone beyond the bilateral scope and assumed growing significance. He proposed that through closer communication and coordination in multilateral fora such as the BRICS, their two nations can jointly contribute to world peace and development.
In his Brasil 247 interview, Amorim identified South American integration as equally central to Brazil’s strategy of securing strategic autonomy.
“Brazil is a great country… but even though it is a great country, in a world with China, the United States, Russia… and a united Europe, you have to think about a united South America”—above and beyond ideological differences, he specified. That principle, he argued, is crucial. He left unsaid the stated intent of the Trump-Rubio team to divide Ibero-American nations between right-wing governments and “socialist” rejects. Amorim was adamant: “We need to work hard, we must not give up, and sometimes we need to turn a blind eye—or perhaps even hold our noses—to continue the integration process with countries that today think in a way that is totally different from ours.”
Regional integration must be built through concrete projects in infrastructure, logistics, energy, and communications. As he put it: “Railroads have no ideology; fiber optics have no ideology.” Such infrastructure can create common interests among the countries in the region, regardless of national political changes.
