Tariff shock: Brazil’s president learns friendship with Trump isn’t real

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has made his relationship with Donald Trump a cornerstone of his diplomacy

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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s US-focused foreign policy efforts suffered a severe setback when his American counterpart Donald Trump pledged to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium on the South American nation. File photo: EPA

Published: 2:58pm, 3 Dec 2019Updated: 2:59pm, 3 Dec 2019

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro learned the hard way Monday what many other leaders have discovered before him: a good personal relationship with US President Donald Trump has its limits.

Bolsonaro and his country’s diplomats in Washington were blindsided after Trump issued a pair of early morning tweets announcing punishing tariffs on steel and aluminium imports from Brazil and Argentina, another country with which Trump had previously enjoyed good relations.

It’s the kind of political whiplash that other world leaders have felt as well. South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who staked his political fortunes on close collaborations with Trump over nuclear negotiations with North Korea, is now facing the president’s demands that Seoul increase its payments fivefold to support US troops stationed on the Korean peninsula.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has courted Trump relentlessly, with nearly four dozen meetings and phone calls and an elaborate state visit to Tokyo in the spring.

But Tokyo was not spared from steel tariffs early in Trump’s tenure, and Trump contradicted Abe over the summer by refusing to declare North Korea’s short-range missile tests a violation of UN resolutions.

Bolsonaro has assiduously courted the American president, parroting his hard-line policies on Venezuela and Hezbollah while breaking with diplomatic protocol by predicting a Trump victory in 2020 during a visit to the White House.

For Bolsonaro, a far-right leader who had patterned his campaign after Trump’s and aggressively sought to ingratiate himself with the White House, the tariffs represented an embarrassing reality check on his strategy of gambling his administration’s foreign policy largely on good personal chemistry with a president who craves validation – but who views virtually all relationships as transactional and, potentially, disposable.