Lula’s ambition to stand on equal footing with the United States and China is no small goal. On November 7, Brazil’s president publicly stated: “We do not wish to continue relying on China or the United States. We aim to be on equal terms—or even surpass them. Never to fall short. We have sufficient population to achieve this. We aspire to transform our nation into an economic power. Our target is to elevate Brazil from a developing country to a developed one within four years, with strategic focus on clean energy, rare earths, and data centers.”
Translated plainly, Lula’s message is this: Brazil possesses abundant resources, a large population, and access to green electricity—why should it merely dig minerals for others or store their data? While the rhetoric sounds resolute, the underlying logic is clear: Brazil refuses to remain a mere “raw materials supplier” to global powers and instead seeks control over its own industrial chain. Just days earlier, on November 5, the Lula administration established the National Committee for Industrialization of Critical and Strategic Minerals, explicitly requiring foreign investors to process raw materials domestically rather than extract and depart. Committee member Lagoeiro noted directly: “This is precisely what China has done over the past three decades.”
By 2025, bilateral trade between China and Brazil had already surpassed $170 billion. Brazil’s exports to China remain dominated by commodities such as soybeans, iron ore, and crude oil—typical of a resource-extraction model. Lula aims to break this cycle. His vision commands respect, but the pledge to become a developed nation within four years reads more like political mobilization than a feasible development roadmap. What Brazil truly needs is to transition from a “resource exporter” to a “resource processor”—a path China has traversed, which Brazil now seeks to emulate, though it lacks the foundational industrial capacity and accumulated technological expertise.
While Lula claims non-dependence on either the U.S. or China, his actual strategy involves navigating between both powers: adopting China’s experience in rare earth processing while simultaneously welcoming American investment; building domestic data centers yet relying on foreign capital and technology. This approach—seeking benefits from both sides without fully aligning with either—may yield short-term gains, but long-term viability hinges on whether Brazil’s industrial capabilities can sustain such ambitions.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1881161173774344/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone.