While NATO bickers over strategy in Libya, BRIC leaders have gathered in Sanya, China, to demonstrate the growing strength of an alternative grouping that has among its principle selling points the fact that it is neither Western nor U.S.-dominated. To compare the world's most potent and enduring military alliance with a loose affiliation of emerging powers that are divided by perhaps more issues than unite them is clearly comparing apples and lychee nuts or guarana seeds, but the juxtaposition of the two events does offer yet another whiff of how the institutions and ideas of the 20th century are giving way to those of the 21st.

In Libya, the potent alliance that "won" the Cold War is coming apart at the seams fighting over strategy, tactics, and objectives in an optional, low-grade intervention in a largely irrelevant country. The U.S. secretary of state is forced to make public pleas for the bumptious commanders of the coalition to get their acts together, while on the ground the weakened forces of the isolated Muammar al-Qaddafi seem to be holding the megapower onslaught at bay. It is too poignant a reminder that intangibles like knowing what you're fighting for and political will are as important to any battle as the hardware being brought to bear by each side on the other.

In Sanya, Brazil, Russia, India, and the hosts welcomed South Africa into their little club, and if they achieved little else they underscored that they are taking coordination among their countries very seriously and seeking to deepen their ties. However, they did go further and offered a broad agenda including more hints that they will push for alternatives to the dollar-dominated global monetary system that we currently have.

Of course, the BRICs summit resonates with the Libya follies because the original four BRICs voted as a bloc to abstain during the Security Council vote on the imposition of the no-fly zone in Libya and within days of its initiation were publicly speaking out against it. That they were joined in the vote by Europe's most powerful country, Germany, also sent a message that the opposition to the initiative was meaningful and suggested that future votes in international institutions might see the BRICs (or the BRICS … if the final "S" is for South Africa) emerge at the core of a potent new alternative coalition to the traditional Western or developed powers.

Read on

After a brief stop at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that will almost certainly be the anticlimax of a 10-day swing through Asia, President Barack Obama will briefly return to Washington to pick up a new change of socks before heading off to Europe. From unsatisfying discussions about the world economy he will move on to unsatisfying discussions about Afghanistan. From difficulties with the new powers of Asia he will move on to difficulties with the old powers of Europe. And through all this he must be thinking, "The heck with the birthers debating where I was born -- if this keeps up, I have to wonder, where am I going to live once I leave this job?"

Admittedly, many of the challenges he faces are not of his own making. He did not send the world economy into a tailspin, gut the U.S. manufacturing sector, recalibrate global labor markets, or introduce the first U.S. troops into Afghanistan. And on this trip to Asia and next week's to Europe he has taken many substantial steps to address these problems and to restore the United States' international footing. From a successful mission to India, the innovative and smart (if largely symbolic) move to endorse India for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, a sensitively handled journey to an Indonesia where he spent time as a boy, and an effort to embrace the new world economic order by continuing to support the empowerment of the G-20, many of his efforts deserve praise.

Having said that, as is often the case with this administration, Obama giveth and Obama taketh away.

The frustrations and missteps of this trip, especially those encountered in Seoul, could have been easily avoided. First, the United States could be somewhat less disingenuous about our economic policies. I am a supporter and admirer of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in most things, but his line that "We will never seek to weaken our currency as a tool to gain competitive advantage or grow the economy…" has to go down as the howler of the month, and may qualify for howler of the year honors next month. In the wake of QE2 and longer-term easing, money-pumping policies -- which are clearly designed to offset what are seen as unfair Chinese currency practices -- the United States is guilty of promoting precisely the race to the bottom that earned such broad condemnation from Europeans, Asians, and other emerging powers in Seoul.

The failure of the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement talks is also due to American misplays. Long ago in this space I warned about the mistake of giving too much authority to the office of Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.) in appointing senior officials at the office of the U.S. Trade Representative. This week, Baucus' influence apparently triggered the breakdown of the Seoul talks. Sources suggest that the Montana senator pushed for greater beef market access beyond what the Koreans had repeatedly said were their limits. The result: A deal the president promised would be done this week floundered -- and its prospects do not look good.

Should the White House, then, have been as surprised and disgruntled as it was this morning by the two column New York Times lead headline "Obama's Economic View Rejected on the World Stage"? Heck no. Them's the facts. What's more, like the election results, perhaps it was a message the team needed to see written out in bold dark type.

Obama embarked on this trip with a message from the American people: They were frustrated with the state of the U.S. economy, and something had to change in the way Washington was dealing with it. As it happens, that is the same message he got from the G-20 leaders in Seoul. While he was away there were two events that may present him with an opportunity to gain ground with both of his stakeholder constituencies, the voters who elected him and the creditors to whom the United States owes so much money. One was that by some sort of alchemy (which is to say the ability of Democrats to do basic arithmetic), the administration realized they would have to accept a deal to extend all the Bush tax cuts, probably for a couple of years. They leaked their inclination in this regard without clearly confirming it. The second was the leaking of the co-chairman's bullet-point summary of the Deficit Commission report. Whatever the problems with their recommendations, they represent the first recent, high-level effort to deal seriously with this problem on both the revenue and the cost side of the ledger.

My sense is that there is a potentially transformational deal here for the president: Agree to an extension of the Bush tax cuts for two years, if Congress agrees to an up or down vote on the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform report -- provided it receives support from at least 14 members of the deficit commission. Link dealing with the poor economy to a commitment to getting our house in order -- as our creditors, allies, and most sensible citizens and neighbors are pleading with us to do. (If it is not "fast track" for the deficit report, perhaps it could be a commitment to linking a deficit reduction plan to the first budget of the new congress.)

The president has three big game changers that could restore his standing at home or abroad. One is a spontaneous recovery of the U.S. economy. Another is catching Osama bin Laden. Neither of these is likely, nor are they things that he has much control over. The last would be establishing himself as a president with the courage to manage us through first a market crisis and then a deficit crisis, who could do so in the face of criticism from both parties and who could engineer support from both parties. It is not that much more likely than the first two "brass ring" events, but it is the one outcome over which he has the most potential control.

Tom Jobim, the songwriter who wrote "The Girl from Ipanema," once observed, "Brazil is not for beginners." It is an insight that was shared with me this weekend by a wise friend in Brasilia.

He was not writing about the woman who decisively won Brazil's presidential election on Sunday, Dilma Rousseff. Despite the assertions of her critics, the woman already known to Brazilians simply as Dilma is no beginner. Those critics and some of her soundly defeated opponents are fond of saying that because she had never run before for elected office she might not have the political skills to manage Brazil's fractious Congress or even her ten party coalitions. But this overlooks the long and remarkable road that brought her from being a guerrilla combating Brazil's military regimes of the 1960s to jail and torture, to getting her degree in economics to a path of local government leading to Lula's cabinet to his invaluable chief of staff.

Furthermore, this kind of criticism overlooks her crafty and tenacious work behind the scenes when Lula's administration was battered by scandal and she played such a central role in holding it together and getting it back on track that from then on many in the government considered her "Lula's prime minister."

No, my friend was not writing about Dilma or anyone else in Brazil. He was writing about the policy community outside the country that is now going to face the challenge of shaping a relationship with the new administration. His point was that as a major, complex, rapidly changing power, Brazil has transcended and made obsolete old formulations about its nature and role. Brazil, he was suggesting, requires new thinking which in turn requires a kind of sophistication -- a more nuanced understanding and creativity that was often lacking in policymakers from traditional powers, particularly the United States. His comments particularly resonated with me after a series of meetings and events in which I have participated during the past few weeks all of which focused on Brazil and Latin America.

During several such gatherings in Washington, in surroundings where you would expect to see the crème de la crème of Western Hemisphere specialists, the level of discussion was frequently frustrating. Many of the views heard were those of superannuated relics of what is certainly the weakest regional policy community in America. Most still see everything in the Americas in terms of left vs. right distinctions which are pretty much meaningless today, as former traditional leftists turned stewards of economic orthodoxies like Lula and Dilma illustrate. These veterans of America's often rather ghastly Latin American policies are fighting Fidel and the contras in the steamy jungles of their minds. On the other hand, some of the younger analysts view Brazil as part of a kind of mystical BRICtopia where economies grow to the sky and upheaval and economic shocks are permanently things of the past. (Things are so fizzy there right now that this is as dangerous as underestimating Brazil's growing geopolitical clout.)

Read on

This may have been the best month for Brazil since about June 1494. That's when the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed granting Portugal everything in the new world east of an imaginary line that was declared to exist 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. This ensured that what was to become Brazil would be Portuguese and thus develop a culture and identity very different from the rest of Spanish Latin America. This guaranteed the world would have samba, churrasco, "The Girl from Ipanema," and through some incredibly fortuitous if twisted chain of events, Gisele Bundchen. 

While it took Brazil sometime to live up to the backhanded maxim that it was "the country of tomorrow and always would be," there is little doubt that tomorrow has arrived for the country even if much work remains to be done to overcome its serious social challenges and tap its extraordinary economic potential.

The evidence that something new and important was happening in Brazil began to build years ago, when then President Cardoso engineered a shift to economic orthodoxy that stabilized a country racked by cycles of boom and bust and mind-blowing inflation. It has gained momentum however, throughout the extraordinary term of the country's current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Some of that momentum is due to Lula's commitment to preserving the economic foundations laid by Cardoso, a courageous political move for a lifelong labor leader from the opposition Workers Party. Some of it is due to luck, a changing global energy paradigm that helped make Brazil's 30 years of investment in biofuels start to pay off in important new ways, massive discoveries of oil off Brazil's coast and growing demand from Asia that has enabled Brazil to become a world agricultural export leader and assume the role of "breadbasket of Asia." But much of it is due to great skill on the part of Brazil's leaders in seizing a moment that many of their predecessors likely would have fumbled.

Of those leaders, much of the credit goes to President Lula who has become a bit of a rock star on the international scene, harnessing energy, drive, charisma, uncanny intuition, and common sense so effectively that his lack of formal education has hardly been an impediment. Some goes to other members of his team, such as his chief of staff Dilma Rousseff, a former energy minister who has become a very tough chief of staff and a possible successor to Lula. But I believe a large amount of it ought to go to Celso Amorim, who has masterminded a transformation of Brazil's role in the world that is almost unprecedented in modern history. He has been Lula's foreign minister since 2003 (he also served in the same role in the 1990s) but I think there is a fair case to be made that he is currently the world's most successful foreign minister.

It is impossible to pinpoint just one turning point in Amorim's efforts to transform Brazil from a lumbering regional power of dubious international clout into one of the most important players on the world stage, acknowledged by global consensus to play an unprecedented leading role. It may have come when he played a central role helping to engineer a pushback by emerging countries against a business-as-usual power play by the U.S. and Europe during the Cancun trade talks in 2003. It might have been the canny way the Brazilians have used issues such as their biofuels leadership to forge new dialogues and influence either with the United States or with other emerging powers. It certainly involved his embrace of the idea of transforming the BRICs from acronym to important geopolitical collaboration, working with his counterparts in Russia, India and China to institutionalize the dialogue between the countries and to coordinate their messages. (Arguably the BRIC helped most by this alliance is Brazil. Russia, China and India all earn places at the table due to military capabilities, population size, economic clout or resources. Brazil has all these things...but less than the others.) It also involved countless other things from the Brazil's deepened and tightened ties with countries like China, it's promotion of both investment flows and a reputation for being comparatively secure in the face of global economic reversals, the comfort level America's new President has with his Brazilian counterpart -- even extending to encouraging them to play a role as a conduit to, for example, the Iranians. Agree or not with their every move in places like Honduras or in the OAS on Cuba, Brazil has also continued to play an important regional role even as it is clear its focus has shifted to the global stage.

Nothing illustrates how far Brazil has come or how effective the Lula-Amorim team has been than the events of the past few weeks. First, the countries of the world cashier the G8 and embrace the G20, guaranteeing Brazil a permanent place at the most important table in the world. Next, Brazil becomes the first country in South America to be awarded the right to host the Olympics. Yesterday's FT carried news that "Asia and Brazil lead rise in consumer confidence", a reflection on the reputation that the government has effectively sold (with the bulk of the credit going to a resurgent Brazilian private sector.) And this week's stories out of the IMF-World Bank meeting in Istanbul show a further institutionalization of Brazil's new role with agreement to change the structure of the International Monetary Fund. According to today's Washington Post: "The nations also preliminarily agreed to reshape the fund's voting structure, promising a blueprint for giving more clout to emerging giants like Brazil and China by January 2011."

Not a bad few days work. And while it's Brazil's Finance Ministry you'll find at IMF-World Bank Meetings, the undisputed architect of this remarkable transformation of Brazil's role in Amorim.

Much work remains to be done, of course. Part of it has to do with the new role that has been shaped. Brazil wants a permanent place on the U.N. Security Council and more of a leadership role in other international institutions. It may well earn these, but it will have to maintain its growth and stability to get there. Further, Brazil seems inclined to minimize regional threats such as those posed by Venezuela (Brazilians tend to look down their nose at their neighbors to the north almost as much as they do toward their Argentine friends to the south ... and thus they under-estimate the ability of men like Hugo Chavez to do too much damage.) And they have an election coming up that may change the cast of players and of course, that can alter the current trajectory in any number of ways -- good and bad.

But it is hard to think of another foreign minister who has so effectively orchestrated such a meaningful transformation of his country's international role. And that's why if I were asked today to cast a ballot, my vote for world's best foreign minister would likely go to Santos' native son, Celso Amorim.

One note on yesterday's post: I received a note late yesterday from a spokesperson for the British Embassy taking issue with my assertion that the British Ambassador had joked that he wasn't getting much attention from the Obama administration. The thrust of their point was that "the Embassy denies categorically that the Ambassador made these remarks, even in jest, and that in our view the relationship between the UK and USA remains as close as ever -- whatever the noises off by febrile commentators in the media." While I stand by my story, their email to me on this was so civil and well-argued that I felt it only fair to pass on their views. I would take the "febrile commentators" point personally, but I had a flu shot only yesterday so they can't possibly mean me.

AFP PHOTO/JUAN MABROMATA