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Kissinger e o Brasil Matias Spektor Jorge Zahar Editor Ltda., 2009, Softcover, 190 pages
REVIEWED BY JOSHUA GOODMAN
These days it seems Brazil can do little wrong in Washington. But what happened the last time the South American giant was in vogue in U.S. policy circles?
This is the subject of Matias Spektor's Kissinger e o Brasil (Kissinger and Brazil), a fascinating and insightful book by the Argentine-born professor of international relations at Rio de Janeiro's Getúlio Vargas Foundation. The book traces the short life of an earlier, unfulfilled U.S.-Brazil alliance that reached its high point in February 1976-when U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, greeted like a celebrity, traveled to Brasilia to sign a historic accord committing the Western Hemisphere's two biggest powers to regular, high-level foreign policy consultations.
The accord capped years of intense diplomacy by Kissinger, who identifi ed Brazil as one of a half-dozen "key" regional powers that could help the United States retain superpower status in the aftermath of its humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam. Kissinger's aim of "delegating authority didn't signify abandoning mechanisms of hegemonic control, but an attempt to adapt and reaffirm American power in the Third World using new mechanisms and a new diplomatic vocabulary," Spektor writes. But the period of intense bilateral diplomacy came to an abrupt halt just one year later when incoming President Jimmy Carter cast a harsher light on human rights abuses by Brazil's military dictatorship.
Spektor first studied this period for his doctoral thesis at Oxford University, drawing on archival research and interviews with policymakers in both countries, including one in...