By Fábio Reis Vianna for the Saker Blog
When Admiral Cheng Ho ordered the retreat of his naval fleet around the year 1424, he left, in the words of the anthropologist Abu-Lughod, “a huge power vacuum”. The first great Chinese expansionist project, started during the Ming Dynasty, was prematurely interrupted there.
After impressive naval expeditions that reached territories as far away as the Indian Ocean and the coast of Africa, and in a decision not yet fully clarified by scholars of the subject, China would abruptly give up the first great expansionist project on a global scale.
It would take no more than 70 years for the Europeans to occupy the great void left by the Chinese and actually begin the adventure that gave rise to what we today call world system.
Six centuries later, China led by Xi Jinping finds itself in an unprecedented crisis in its recent successful history as the undisputed leader of the globalization process. The Covid-19 pandemic that abruptly hits the entire planet, for China in particular, was a hard blow that created an imbalance in its model of political and economic stability.
In the first three months of 2020, trade between China and the rest of the world fell by 6.4%, a figure unthinkable by Chinese standards. In particular, trade with the United States, the European Union and Japan declined 18.3%, 10.4% and 8.1% respectively.
Even with the strong decrease of contagion within Chinese territory, there is a great concern to accelerate the reopening of productive activities. The concern with increasing poverty and political destabilization are evident. In his recent visit to Shaanxi province, Xi Jinping made a point of underlining in his speech the importance of the fight against poverty.
In addition to incentives to businesses, investments in infrastructure and financial aid to the population, a series of structural reforms are planned to enable the country to overcome the terrible crisis triggered by Covid-19. An important annual session of the National People’s Congress is scheduled for May 22nd, and more details can be examined there.
Meanwhile, Brazil, one of the countries that in the recent past could be considered one of the most important allies of the Eurasian integration project outside Eurasia, is experiencing the greatest political-economic crisis in its entire history and is sinking deeper and deeper into an unprecedented internal war.
Something that is being discussed internally among the Chinese establishment is precisely the creation of mechanisms to contain the risk of instability that the social tensions arising from economic difficulties could trigger.
Brazil had already been experiencing cascading crises that had accumulated year after year since June 2013, when the country was the target of a destabilization process – or hybrid war – that triggered a series of other more or less orchestrated events (such as the lawfare against specific targets) that culminated in the weakening of institutions that had been strengthened since the enactment of the 1988 Constitution.
To make matters worse, and in contrast to the Chinese stance in seeking to contain internal instability, the country is astonished at the erratic attitudes of President Bolsonaro, under the consenting silence of his military orbits.
Having been chosen to occupy the highest position in the Republic, in all probability during the fateful visit of the then American secretary of defense, James Mattis “Mad Dog”, in August 2018 (two months before the presidential elections), when in a peculiar and closed meeting between the American and the High Command of the Armed Forces the password was given, and Bolsonaro was anointed to the mission to prevent the return of the left and realign Brazil to the satellite condition of the United States.
Everything leads us to believe that the crumbling of the Brazilian institutions has lit a warning signal within the Brazilian Armed Forces, which, in a mixture of sincere concern and sense of opportunity, took advantage of the power vacuum to move forward in the resumption of a protagonism that has been dormant for over 30 years.
Many forget, but the presence of the military – and especially the army – in the Brazilian political tradition dates back to the proclamation of the Republic in 1889, which opened the series of military coups that guided the entire Republican period to this day.
It is worth remembering that the occupation of strategic positions by the military became more visible when the current Minister of Defense, Fernando Azevedo e Silva, strangely, was appointed by the president of the Supreme Court, Dias Toffoli, to the position of special advisor.
Curiously, this has been happening in the month of September 2018 (between the visit of Secretary James Mattis and the election of Bolsonaro), where Dias Toffoli said he would have invited General Azevedo e Silva after requesting a nomination to the then commander of the army, General Eduardo Villas Bôas.
General Villas Bôas is the same man who, in April 2018, wrote on Twitter a veiled threat to the ministers of the Supreme Court if they found the habeas corpus request of former President Lula to be justified. The day after the constitutional remedy was judged, former President Lula would have his arrest ordered by then-judge Sergio Moro.
As a kind of Ayatollah, General Villas Bôas reproduces a classic character of Brazilian politics until the 1950s: the military chief.
At that time, personified by the figure of Brigadier Eduardo Gomes, the military chief was a kind of “guardian of morals and good customs” of the nation and justified the political action of the military as holders of an unwritten “moderating power”. In this way, the military attributed themselves to the exercise of the “veto power” of the Republic. In the context of the Cold War, the power of veto was invoked to curb the communist threat.
After more than 60 years, and when many thought that the Brazilian Armed Forces would be totally professionalized and away from politics, we find ourselves led by an Executive Power integrated by no less than 3 thousand military personnel; not to mention the eight ministries occupied by men in uniform.
As in a trench battle, the military had been advancing day after day in the control and tutelage of state organs and institutions of the Republic, but if there was a well articulated strategy of occupation of power, with the arrival of Covid-19 the pieces definitely shuffled.
Today Brazil is moving forward to become the world epicenter of Covid-19, and as the pandemic seems to get out of control, the more the military tries to control the internal systemic chaos.
Moreover, if before Covid-19 there was some cohesion in the Brazilian establishment around the neoliberal reforms carried out by the Ministry of Economy, with the bursting of the health crisis, it is every day more evident the split between business sectors, the big media, the National Congress and the Judiciary, which are now frontally positioned in opposition to the government.
The recent meetings between the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Rodrigo Maia, and the President of the Supreme Court, Dias Toffoli, with the Minister “eminence parda” of the Palácio do Planalto, General Braga Netto, were a subtle attempt at intimidation and framing of two of the most important civil authorities of the Republic by the Bolsonaro government.
At the same time that the basements of the government’s disinformation machine slanders adversaries and agitates the low ranks of the Armed Forces and the military police of the states (its faithful allies), the country sinks in what is certainly the greatest existential crisis in its history.
As if all this were not enough, the rest of the world coexists with the prospect of incurring a public debt only seen, according to the British magazine The Economist, “amid the rubble of 1945”.
Beyond the health crisis itself, the economic consequences of the post-Pandemic will be devastating from the fiscal point of view, because the compulsory closure of industry, offices and various segments of the service sector will certainly bring about a fall in government revenues.
As many analysts have already noted, the world is experiencing the exact moment of transition between what no longer exists and what is yet to be born.
Even before the pandemic, the acceleration of interstate competition is noticeable, which denotes the phenomenon of deconcentration of power that throughout the history of the world system always occurs in periods of decline in the long cycles of international politics.
Something that the Brazilian elites, especially the military elites – psychologically trapped in imaginary enemies such as Chinese communists and “cultural Marxists” – have not yet realized, is the dimension of Brazil’s importance in the geopolitical context of this new century that is beginning.
With the shattering of Bretton Woods institutions and the liberal order hegemonized by the United States, the world draws – and we are all characters – a systemic configuration that has not yet been defined. In process.
As it had happened between about 1550 and 1640, when the world, still dominated by the powerful Spain, saw the movements of contestation to the empire that had built its power in the newly discovered America flourish.
Trapped by the wealth of gold and the medieval system of government that no longer corresponded to reality, the Habsburgs – in their alliance with the papacy – fought so that their hegemony would not disintegrate amid the rise of the newest actors in the system, namely, France, Holland, Sweden and England.
At that time, Europe was swallowed up by an unprecedented escalation of wars stemming from those new realities of power whose new actors, emerging in the northwest of the old continent, were unwilling to submit to Spanish power.
The translation of that scenario was the deepening of the systemic chaos that would be pacified only with the advent of the Treaty of Westphalia. Any resemblance to the present world moment is no mere coincidence, at least for geopolitical scholars.
Going back to the year 2020, it is very likely that some aspects will prove to be clearer and bolder in the post-Pandemic. Technological competition, more visible around 5G, tends to radicalize in many other areas. And the search for natural/energy resources is already a reality and places not only Africa, but South America itself as the target of the new imperialist race that should also deepen.
For now, the Brazilian establishment is a mere spectator of the rapid changes that the world system will see in the coming years.
China, even though it has been severely hit by the Covid-19 meteor, is reinventing itself in its policy of global humanitarian aid to effectively combat the virus and is focusing its action on strengthening the Eurasian integration project; in particular the Belt and Road Initiative – BRI.
Demonstrating impressive resilience, despite the strong retraction in exports to central countries, the Chinese saw an increase of 3.2% with the New Silk Road countries. Although not comparable to previous years, it shows that BRI’s infrastructure projects have not been so strongly affected by the adverse effects of the health crisis.
Nothing more appropriate to the thought and conduct of Confucian cosmology, based beyond mere rambling, in a concrete act, an action.
Thus, the Chinese follow their journey towards the central helm of the world system, consciously absorbing the pillars of Western modernity, but without ever losing the essence of Confucian thought, the Tao-to that always seeks effectiveness beyond mere thought.
Next June marks seven years of uninterrupted political-institutional instability in Latin America’s largest country. May the history of the oldest peoples and the winds of change teach us to guide the helm of our own destiny.
Fabio Reis Vianna, lives in Rio de Janeiro, is a bachelor of laws ( LL.B), writer and geopolitical analyst. He is currently a columnist in international politics for the printed version of the centennial Brazilian newspaper Monitor Mercantil.
Stability in Brazil and the western hemisphere in general will have to wait for the neutering or dismantling of the US empire, which unfortunately probably still has a decade or more of life still left in it. Not so much because its own internal strength, which is fading precipitously as we speak, but from the weakness and dissension it has sown in otherwise functional countries the world over. The transition period should be interesting, to say the least. Fading peacefully into irrelevance doesn’t seem to be an option.
For those of us who recall the ’60s and the horrors of the repression by the military, it is very sad to see the Brazil of 2020 fall back into the hands of the fascist military. Now, with the pandemic taking such a high toll of lives and crippling completely the health care system, we can only hope that it collapses the stranglehold of the government on Brazil’s domestic development and civil liberties.
Of course this denudes the BRICS of a major component, and it will be thus for a decade as this calamity plays out.
For such a talented and beautiful people to have to journey again to the bottom of despair is a great human catastrophe and a severe loss to the world.
Let’s hope that this reign of the military does not last two decades like the last one.
Larchmonter445
Unfortunately the influence of the military in Brazil will depend on the amount of influence which the US has over it. Brazil is just too big and wealthy to be permitted to go it’s own course, as it would influence all others in Latin America, not to mention it’s relationship with Russia and China.
The problem are fascistic and racist elements in society which created a Bolsonaro in Brazil, cheered a coup in Bolivia and supported a Macri in Argentina.
A middle class from the big cities, loosing power and money in the recession of this decade and fighting the progressive economic distribution policies of Lula, Kirchner and Evo Morales.
The U.S made good use of this by having the big media creating dirty campaigns and the corrupted judiciary picking up the allegations to create the lawfare in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, etc.
Eventually the majority will silence this treasonous sectors of society, as we are seiing in Argentina
Cheers from France.
Yep, the hegemon is alive and kicking. BRICS is smashed in pieces and India is the Empire’s used Trojan.
Germany is looking East? Very naive if you think so. Turkey is after all a NATO member not only occupying a big piece of Syria but also bogging down Russia at the same time. Oh, and Poland is hosting nukes now.
yes, agreed.
Will have to wait until the dismantling of the warshington empire before they return to an acceptable form of sovereignty and a build up of a development project of their own…
And if this dismantling takes a two decade slow process to take place…
a long painful self healing process is at sight.
The famous political philosopher Bertrand Russell visited the fledgling Soviet Union in 1920 and even had discussions with Lenin and Trotsky, as chronicled in his short book, ‘The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism.’ Although in fact Russell was opposed to Bolshevism as he understood it, there was one sentence that had always stuck in my mind. Viz.
”It seems evident, from the attitude of the capitalist world to Soviet Russia of the Entente to the Central Empire, and of England to Ireland and India, that there is no depth of cruelty, perfidy or brutality which the present holders of power will shrink from when they feel themselves threatened. If order to oust them, nothing short of religious fanaticism will serve, it is they who are the prime sources of the resultant evils.
The present holders of power are evil men, and the present manner of life is doomed.”
It should be noted that the evil men to whom Russell alluded were not Trotsky or Lenin.
“If order to oust them, nothing short of religious fanaticism will serve, it is they who are the prime sources of the resultant evils.
The present holders of power are evil men, and the present manner of life is doomed.”
And that is our problem.Russell was totally correct in that statement.But of those fighting the Colossus today only,Iran and North Korea have that “fire in the belly”,but not the power to win. Those with the power,especially when united,to defeat the Colossus,don’t have the guts to use their power.So just as in Russell’s time,evil won’t be defeated until the world once again suffers horribly. I’ve understood that since Ukraine in 2014. Though like many others I lie to myself and hope I’m wrong.
Excellent article. In the middle of this deep crisis in Brazil we must take a very fine look of the decisions of the brazilian army in the coming months. First around USA military agression against Venezuela, second in the next Brics Summit this summer. The americans have still not succeded in breaking the Brics, and I’m sure that nationalist sectors in the brazilian army are taking a close look of the crumbling of the USA and calculating costs and benifits of an unconditonal summision to a declining world power.
With its large population of 212M, its huge land mass and the vast natural resources that it has, Brazil is the natural leader in South America.
Consequently, the US fears the potential influence that Brazil has in relation to other countries in the region if it acts outside the perceived interests of the US.
I.e. a complient government of lackeys, is what the US has always wanted in Brasil.
Lula and Dilma Rousseff pursued policies that sought to realize Brazil’s huge potential and they made it an important BRIC member.
Those policies ran counter to US hegemonic goals and therefore, the US instructed that the Brazilian miliary be taken out of storage and allowed to resume its historic role, which is to ensure that US interests are protected and the Brazilian 99% be kept in line.
Enter Bolsonaro the clown.
It should come as no surprise to find that Jair Bolsonaro enjoys the full support of the Jewish community in Brazil.
And just like how he mimics Trump’s misguided policies on the Coronovirus Pandemic, he has similarly towed Washington’s line with regard to Israel: moving his country’s embassy to Jerusalem and demostrating hostility to the Palestinians and their cause.
As the US slips into irrelevance, Brazilians will have to decide if the country lives up to its potential and take its rightful place in the multi-polar world that will emerge, or continue to serve US interests with nothing but crime and poverty to show for it.
Selah
I am not at all convinced the Brazilian military was eager to again meddle in politics. They know what a clownery Brazilian politics always has been, and how lengthy and painful a process it was to get back into their quarters in the mid-80ies.
For the current lamentable state of affairs to prevail in the political landscape in Brazil, the country really does not need the US at all. It gets there and stays there without much help.
And yes, I share your contempt for the present administration, vile and corrupt as any. Still, there is no doubt both the PT and the PSDB/PMDB political “centre” parties had completely lost any kind of trust on the side of the elector. I have no doubt Bolosonaro legitimately won the presidential election, just out of disgust for all the established political figures.
Brazil is, after all, a country in which colonial structures still prevail. The country is run by 100 powerful families (if that figure is not too high). Partly in charge since the 16th century. Those who have power and money have no intention to change anything. Those who want change have no clue (nor the wherewithal) to fight for it. The standstill is guaranteed. If by any chance someone is voted into power against the will of the 100 families, then congress will become an insurmountabe obstacle. Corruption makes sure that is the outcome.
Has happend time and again!
Just remember how Jânio Quadros, lacking any support for his anticorruption campaign in Brasília, was effectively finished after a couple of months.
So every night, he would retire into his palace and watch cowbow movies. A sad, lonely man.
That is Brazil my dear.
No big hopes. No big dreams (“such a beautiful country, with such promising talent”).
Sorry, but that is all bullshit.
The country has been, and likely continues to be, a failed state.