Brazil’s leadership ambitions are having a bad moment.
The White House’s historic intervention in Venezuela has exposed the geopolitical impotence of Latin America’s largest economy. The US not only removed the leader of a South American country in a matter of hours without suffering a single casualty;it effectively installed a protectorate in a nation that shares a 2,200km border with Brazil.
Brasilia’s response amounted to little more than a joint communique with five ideological allies, expressing “deep concern” over the unilateral military incursion. Careful words, private grudges, minimal action.
It did not have to be this way. If the US felt emboldened to carry out an unprecedented operation in Venezuela, disregarding diplomacy and international law, it was partly because Brazil spent years misreading the crisis and failing to act on the most severe conflict Latin America has faced this century, unfolding right on its northern border. As the region’s self-styled leader and an aspiring global power, Brazil should have been at the forefront of efforts to contain Chavismo and hold it accountable for its blatant human rights abuses and systematic dismantling of democracy. Instead, it allowed an increasingly authoritarian regime to entrench itself, at enormous cost to regional stability, human suffering and migration flows.
At times, Brazil did more than tactically stand aside; it enabled the Caracas regime. The most egregious case came in May 2023, when Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva rolled out the red carpet for then-Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, dismissing accusations of dictatorship as mere “narrative” designed to weaken the Caracas government.
Despite boasting the region’s most sophisticated diplomatic corps, deep institutional knowledge of Venezuela and extensive regional networks, Lula’s partisan foreign policy — more attuned to domestic politics and his leftist base than to democratic principles — proved to be a spectacular failure. Over time, even distant mediators, such as Norway or Qatar, enjoyed greater credibility as honest brokers in Venezuela than Brazil did.
Fast forward to 2026, it is no exaggeration to say that Brazil, perhaps alongside Cuba, has emerged as the biggest loser from the geopolitical reshuffle orchestrated by US President Donald Trump’s White House. Today, Brasilia is little more than a bystander to a complex nation-building experiment unfolding across its Amazonian frontier, with little influence and even less say.
For a country that aspires to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, this diminished role should provoke uncomfortable soul-searching. Over the past two decades, Brazil invested heavily in grand, but toothless diplomatic projects, such as the BRICS, embraced lofty slogans about the “global south” and hosted every flashy international event from the Olympics to climate summits. Yet it neglected the most basic requirement of leadership: keeping its own neighborhood in order.
Worse still, Brasilia conveniently ignored decades of regional institutional work aimed at offering collective responses to democratic backsliding. Indeed, as others have noted, Brazil led much of the region’s left in camouflaging an indifference to authoritarian drift with respect for sovereignty, ultimately paving the way for direct US intervention.
This moral blunder is especially regrettable, because Brazil has much to offer in reshaping global governance: respect for institutional norms and democratic values, a capable state bureaucracy, a tradition of peaceful dispute resolution and vast strategic resources. However, multilateralism cannot serve as an excuse for paralysis or, worse, as cover for criminal regimes, as Venezuela repeatedly demonstrated.
Trump’s approach might be questionable. Yet to many in the region, especially the millions of long-suffering Venezuelans, Washington is at least proposing a path forward. Brazil, by contrast, offered only more of the status quo and the pretense that the conflict did not exist. More troubling still is the suspicion that some policymakers are quietly rooting for Trump’s strategy to fail, allowing Brazil to claw back relevance by default. That would only compound the original error.
A democratic, prosperous and free Venezuela should be among Brazil’s top priorities, regardless of petty geopolitical calculations. Helping achieve that goal would raise Brazil’s standing in the region — not diminish it.
So, what comes next? Notably, Lula has chosen caution, focusing on the EU-Mercosur free-trade deal and restraining his long-standing instinct to tap into anti-US rhetoric even as elections loom. Whether by design or circumstance, Trump’s decision to make peace with the Brazilian leader weeks before his Venezuela offensive proved strategically astute. Lula now finds himself boxed in, unable to confront Washington without jeopardizing a fragile detente. In that sense, Trump has delivered a salutary lesson in pragmatism to the octogenarian former union leader, who is often rigid in foreign affairs.
For now, Brasilia should keep its head down and return to its traditional foreign-policy strengths: defending democracy while pushing for a meaningful reform of the international system at a moment when multilateralism faces its greatest test since World War II. As Bruna Santos, director of the Brazil Program at the Inter-American Dialogue, told me: Brazil has not only lost influence and coordination capacity in the region; the risks of strategic non-alignment vis-a-vis Washington have also increased.
“It is in Brazil’s own interest to show that multilateralism needs reform, including at the UN Security Council,” she said.
Brazil is not alone in falling short in this tragedy; other Latin American countries share responsibility. However, leadership is not declared, it is earned. And in Venezuela, Brazil squandered its clearest opportunity in a generation to prove it deserved that distinction.
JP Spinetto is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin American business, economic affairs and politics. He was previously Bloomberg News’ managing editor for economics and government in the region. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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