https://carnegie-mec.org/2023/11/24/gaza-war-and-rest-of-world-pub-91106
Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, has long sought to position Latin America’s largest country as an important actor on the international stage, with a seat at the table of the powerful and the capacity to set the agenda of the global debate. In 2010, he sought to negotiate, alongside Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a nuclear deal with Iran’s then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which generated considerable friction with the Obama administration. In 2023, upon returning to the presidency, one of his initial foreign policy priorities was to find a way of ending the war in Ukraine, and several of his comments generated perplexity among Western partners. In the same way, Brazil, which held the Security Council’s rotating presidency at the time of the terrorist attacks by Hamas on October 7, quickly sought to negotiate a United Nations Security Council resolution that would help to deescalate the situation.
Underlying these strategies is a deep-seated conviction that global decisionmaking processes, especially in the geopolitical realm, have too long been dominated by a small number of (mostly Western) powers, and that countries in the Global South, such as Brazil, deserve more of a say. This includes discussing how to resolve the ongoing conflict between…
