For years the hackneyed joke about Brazil was that it was the country of tomorrow and always would be. But almost a decade ago, in the wake of the reforms of the Cardoso administration, and then thanks to the remarkable presidential tenure of Luiz Inacio "Lula" Da Silva and the industry and enterprise of the Brazilian people, the joke was overtaken by events. As investors, CEOs, journalists and most of the world's leading powers have recognized, Brazil has arrived.

While U.S. leaders like Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama have acknowledged the change, many in the U.S. policy community remained holdouts or skeptics. Yes, Brazil was on the rise they said, but they always found a way to qualify their views, to establish one criteria or another that Brazil would have to meet before it was finally seen as a "first-class power." While Asia specialists embraced the rise of China and India and quickly began to remake policy based on changing power relationships, Latin specialists clung to the past, to old formulations and prejudices.

In the eyes of these living museum pieces of Washington's small, inbred Latin American affairs community, Brazil might be the country of tomorrow, it might even be the country of later on today, but we would be sticking with the policies of yesterday until further notice.

Today, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has issued a new task force report on U.S.-Brazil relations that goes a long way toward breaking with the past by recommending the U.S. move toward a new policy stance with regard to Brazil.  The central point of the report is that Brazil must be liberated from the Latin policy barrio and viewed as one of the most important global powers of today and of the century ahead. 

Read on

Scrooge. The Grinch. Critics calling out the cinematic deficiencies of "Love Actually." Christmas humbuggery is a cliché.

I however, am a New Year's curmudgeon. The holiday is a fraud celebrated by idiots. Our arbitrary slicing of time into comprehension-sized chunks and then celebrating the false distinctions between December 31 and the first of January is a big honking nonsense.

The fact that this ersatz holiday then motivates people to put on silly hats and drink to excess to celebrate the non-event event compounds the ridiculousness of it all and makes it dangerous to leave the safety of your couch. The only thing that adds any gravity to the activity at all is America's tradition of spending part of the evening watching Dick Clark slowly losing body functions on live national television. (I sympathize with the man and admire his courage. But he seems to be crowning a lifetime of cashing in on his bad taste with an ultimate grotesqueness: a multi-year, hard-to-watch reality show about his own demise.)

That said, you don't have to be a drunken lunatic who spends 10 hours trapped in the freezing cold in Times Square waiting for Snooki to be dropped in a glass hamster ball to add to the absurdity of this annual ritual about nothing. No, even very serious types like commentators and still grave but less credible types like bloggers regularly mark the holiday in ways that make them bigger laughingstocks than the insurance salesmen with lampshades on their heads who made the holiday famous: They make predictions.

Invariably the predictions do not come true. There is a charming irony in this: celebrating a non-event through the ritual listing of other soon-to-be non-events. (The New York Times has even run an entertaining discussion forum this week on why we seem to need predictions and how hard they are to make.) It is all a cousin to our penchant for marking the "new" year with resolutions to distinguish the year from that which came before it -- and which are all soon forgotten in ways that should remind us of the falseness of such distinctions.

But while I may condemn the holiday -- which is why on New Year's Eve I will sit here in Paris in our rented digs in the Sixth Arrondissement listening to the nearby revelry on the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail while quietly sipping Diet Coke and irritating my very patient wife just as I do each and every other night -- I am not so egotistical as to think my protests can undo the culturally embedded traditions of the season. I also don't think I can ignore the requests of the editors at FP any longer. So I too will now offer some New Year's predictions.

However, in an effort to avoid the kind of pitfalls of which I am critical, I will skip right over the dubious maybes of most pundits and cut right to what you want to know the most: I will list only those things that are absolutely certain to happen in 2011.

Read on

We are not in Kansas anymore. More importantly, Kansas is not even where it once was.

Once upon a time and in the minds of most living Americans, Kansas was more than just a synonym or a metaphor for America's heartland, it was the actual geographic mid-point of the United States. You could debate whether the exact location deserving of this honor was closer to Lebanon or Grenola, but at the end of the day, all would agree that by virtue of the power and position of the United States, somewhere out there in the middle of nowhere was the center of the world.

No more. America may be the richest and most powerful nation on earth. But the world's economic center of gravity is shifting away from Kansas much more rapidly than anyone had any reason to expect it would even a decade or so ago. (I know this for a fact -- as a senior economic official in the Clinton Administration who helped put together and run the first U.S. inter-agency effort focused on the world's largest emerging markets, I remember how officials would smile patronizingly and roll their eyes, "Yes, China, India, Brazil, yes... important, but not in our lifetimes.")

Read on

This weekend the Obama Administration will send a team to China headed by the somewhat unlikely duo of Larry Summers, head of the National Economic Council, and Tom Donilon, deputy national security advisor. The purpose is to send a clear message that the U.S. is approaching its relations with China strategically, with a view that integrates the full range of economic and security concerns.

While such trips are old hat for Summers, the journey represents a bit of a change of pace for Donilon, the inside guy who is credited with having done a great job making sure the policy process trains have been running on time within the National Security Council. Some in Washington are buzzing that this is a profile- and skill-raising trip intended to make Donilon a better candidate to replace National Security Advisor James L. Jones should Jones decide to depart, as many expect he will. Others grumble that the trip represents precisely the kind of "operational" role for the NSC and NEC that many cabinet departments have long thought should be out of bounds for White House policy coordinators.

But beyond the Washington gossip the trip has caused, the juxtaposition of economic and security concerns offers an illustration of an often over-looked fact -- the centrality of economic issues to current U.S. national security concerns. In China, the tricky calculus is fostering collaboration on security issues from North Korea to Iran in the face of political pressure back home to press Beijing harder on issues like currency valuation and unfair competitive practices (especially those associated with pressuring foreign firms to transfer proprietary technologies).

The U.S. has never been especially effective at coordinating its multiple interests in China so that pressure in one policy area produces progress in another -- or even simply avoids causing setbacks. So this trip, in concept at least, represents a step in the right direction -- at least if Congress doesn't undercut the administration's efforts by, for example, drafting its own legislation on currency issues.

But China is just one of a host of current hotspots where Summers, Geithner, and the international economic team are playing a central role on national security issues.

For example, in Afghanistan, the story of the week turns on the amazingly brazen behavior of the Karzai gang in trying to pressure the United States into bailing out a clearly corrupt and mismanaged bank in which President Hamid Karzai's brother, Mahmood Karzai, is the third largest shareholder. Mahmood has publicly called for a bailout even though his affiliation with a bank through which U.S. funds flow to Afghan security forces compromises both him and the president. Both remain unabashed, however, behaving like the proverbial kids who murder their parents and seek the mercy of the court on the grounds that they are now orphans. So the United States is in a pickle: Step in and support the Afghan kleptocracy and its culture of corruption or stand on principle (and law), and run the risk that the bank falters. It's not a situation that General David Petraeus can handle, but how the economic team manages it will have direct ramifications for him.

In the same way, some of the most sensitive concerns regarding Pakistan turn on economic policy. Will the Zardari government pump too much cash into the economy to deal with the aftereffects of the devastating flooding, and risk a major inflationary episode? Or will it introduce price controls and a set of micro economic measures that, if mismanaged, could produce social tensions or even rioting? The wrong mix of policies could plunge the already fractured and battered country into political turmoil and perhaps the reintroduction of military rule.

In talks with the Israelis and the Palestinians, many of the core concerns will turn on how to improve the economic conditions for the Palestinian people. If they can get past initial hurdles, they will, of course, ultimately have to move to a state structure that will enable organic economic growth in a Palestinian state, actually fostering job and wealth creation for people who have lived in an economic no man's land for too long.

In North Korea, it is reported that the administration, conducting high level meetings on the subject this week, is seeking to explore "engagement." In the case of the economically isolated and struggling North, that inevitably will mean economic packages in exchange for gradual normalization of relations or reductions of threats.  At the same time, this week, the administration widened sanctions intended to force Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons.

In Iran, the core initiative at the moment is making targeted economic sanctions work. In Iraq, the issue is fostering economic growth to help "purchase" social stability. The list goes on. It is clear that wherever the stakes are highest for the United States in the world, even as military and diplomatic initiatives garner most of the attention, behind the scenes much of the most critical work is being undertaken by international economic officials.

It is interesting to note in this respect that the responsibility for conceiving and coordinating most of these activities lies in the White House to a much greater degree than it does with military or diplomatic initiatives. The White House team on these issues is excellent. But in the end, these functions are so fundamental that the real leadership capabilities need to be cultivated elsewhere.

The economic team at the State Department could and should play a greater role in this respect; Undersecretary for Economic Affairs Robert Hormats is a talented and experienced official. As I have written before, State also could and should develop a dramatically enhanced capability when it comes to emergency economic intervention -- pre- or post-crisis. And all the other economic agencies need to be prepared to collaborate on this, not on an ad hoc basis but through a permanent program promoting cross-training and what the military might call inter-operability. Call it an economic rapid response capability -- or call them economic green berets.

We need people we can drop into critical situations and help manage them with an eye to our security and political needs rather than traditional purely economic metrics. That's a critical role for which development officials are ill-suited, and we still don't really have the fully developed institutional structure we need to support it.

Looking at the issues faced by the United States today, while one can't help but admire much of what is being done, the strategic side of the international economic agenda is such that it warrants some real thought about how and with whom we should be meeting such challenges in the future.

Attention blogosphere: By attacking Hormats, you're going after the wrong man.

Once again, it's time to slow down the blogosphere and wait for the facts to catch up to another story. (I'm starting to conclude that despite all the technical evidence to the contrary, the Internet actually runs on hormones rather than electrons.)

This time the story is about the nomination of Goldman Sachs International Vice Chairman Robert Hormats to be Under Secretary of State for Economic, Agricultural and Energy Affairs and the allegation by several small advocacy groups that he is somehow tainted by some brief comments he made about a Goldman deal that pumped cash into a division of a Chinese company whose parent organization had some ties to bad guys in the Sudan.

The problem is that in going after Hormats, they are likely going after one of the people most likely to be an effective ally for the alleged goal of these groups to further constrain any sort of private funding that might support genocide anywhere in the world.

Now as any reader of this blog knows, I am no fan of the oversized role Goldman Sachs has come to play in shaping economic policy in America. I am on the record as saying that far too many senior Goldman executives have played top roles in the United States government. I am also deeply concerned at the lack of progress the world has made to contain genocide or threats of future genocides. To me, it should -- along with combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction -- be a top priority of the entire international security community.

What readers of this brief post should also know is that I have known Bob Hormats for many years and that while we probably should be entering a phase in which we bend over backwards to dial down the number of Goldman appointments, this is certainly a case where an exception is warranted. I'd go further, it is a case where an exception should be actively sought.

Let's frame the question in the words of one of the appointment's critics, journalist Matt Taibbi who wrote the scorching Rolling Stone attack on Goldman that I recommended to readers very recently. He writes:

"You've got to fill a key post at State, and you can't find someone who isn't a former Goldman banker with a controversial human-rights profile? There are an awful lot of people on the earth; why this clown?"

Well, let's take his questions one at a time. First, he suggests Hormats has a controversial human-rights profile. his is clearly a reference to the current dust up in which several small groups including the Genocide Intervention Network, Investors Against Genocide and the Public Accountability Initiative all suggest that Hormats is at fault because in 2000 he made two on the record statements asserting that precautions had been taken in an upcoming PetroChina financing to ensure funds did not go to its parent company CNPC which had dealings in Sudan.

Here's what Hormats said to the Wall Street Journal at the time: "Sudan should not be an issue because of extensive legal firewalls in place to ensure that IPO proceeds are used domestically in China." But later the SEC fined Goldman $2 million for a number of minor securities law violations suggesting they had improperly promoted PetroChina stock including a reference to statements from an unnamed executive who might be Hormats that the SEC felt might have prematurely promoted interest in the stock. The statements in question were allegedly those made to the Journal and to the Washington Post by Hormats concerning the firewalls between PetroChina and CNPC.

As a result of the above and invoking the horrors in Darfur throughout, these advocacy groups have determined that Hormats nomination should be called into question. At least, they suggest, when he comes before the Senate in early September, he should face tough questioning on his views on these issues. I say, by all means question him, because I think this is what they will find:

1. Hormats statements to the press in 2000 were, as such statements always are (and as the SEC acknowledged they were) simply lawyer language provided to Hormats by Goldman attorneys. He was saying what the firm requested him to say. And furthermore, he was not only articulating what the firm saw as the truth but he was reflecting efforts by Goldman to try to keep proceeds of the financing away from operations of CNPC that might impact Sudan. Finally the IPO was, to my knowledge, structured in strict compliance with U.S. sanctions law at the time of filing.

2. That despite the implications in almost all the releases that what Goldman did is somehow connected to Darfur, the financing was in 2000 and the genocide in Darfur did not start until 2003.

3. That Hormats involvement in the deal beyond the statements he was requested to make was virtually nil.

Of course, what they will also find is that Hormats is, sorry Matt Taibi, no clown. First, he probably has one of the most exceptional records of public service of any nominee to high office in this administration. He has served in four different prior administrations for both parties. He has served as both Deputy United States Trade Representative (under Jimmy Carter) and as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs.

He has managed international economic issues on the National Security Council. He has also got a long background of work on Africa and I know him to be highly sensitive to the issues of the sort raised by these advocacy groups. (He spent a year working on development issues in Kenya and Tanzania.) I have known him over 20 years and I can say also that he is undoubtedly one of the most decent (not to mention intelligent and capable) guys I have ever met in any line of work.

I'm all for going after half-baked appointments of money guys. I do it all the time. But this is actually one of the good guys. My guess is that he would give these genocide groups one of their best advocates in the administration... and that working with an administration with real sensitivities in this area, they could significantly enhance safeguards against all forms of support of genocide.

But there is an easy way to find out. They should ask him during the hearings. And if his answers are as his life's work suggests they will be, they should recognize the wisdom behind this particular nomination and support it without reservation.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images