What are the geopolitical and geo-economic implications of President Lula’s most recent visit to Asia by the end of March?
President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva visited Japan and Vietnam for foreign engagement. In the first case, to commemorate 130 years of diplomatic relations between Brazil and Japan, the national delegation, led by the president and accompanied by ministers of state as well as representatives of other powers, sought to broaden the conditions for a closer partnership that is considered strategic, with a view to greater Brazilian access to Japanese markets and establishing agreements in different areas such as science, technology, and energy.
In Vietnam, trade perspectives were joined by other relevant issues, such as expectations of greater political cooperation, progress in partnerships involving technology, trade, and agriculture, and the prospect of attracting new investments. Lula’s first visit to the country took place in 2008 when he became the first Brazilian head of state to travel to Hanoi. More than a decade later, in his third term, bilateral relations continued to strengthen with the visit of Vietnamese Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính to Brazil in 2023. As a way of reciprocating diplomatic and commercial ties, this year, the Brazilian president visited the country again with a commitment to continue the partnership between the nations.
It is worth noting that one of the main horizons projected by the Brazilian government is to increase trade between Brazil and Vietnam to $ 15 billion by 2030, twice as much as in 2024. That same year, Vietnamese were responsible for 34% of Brazilian imports from Southeast Asian countries and ranked fourth among ASEAN states in terms of exports. Cotton, corn, soybeans, wheat, and coffee account for 70% of the country’s trade with Vietnam (Brazil, 2025).
With Lula’s visit, Brazilian agribusiness achieved a significant breakthrough: the reopening of the Vietnamese beef market. Exports have been suspended since 2017 as a result of Operation Weak Flesh – the Federal Police investigation into the sale of adulterated meat from Brazil on domestic and foreign markets. During his visit, Lula pointed out that this reopening could attract investments from Brazilian meatpackers in Vietnam, turning the country into an “export platform for Southeast Asia”. Vietnam currently consumes approximately 300,000 tons of beef per year and could become a hub for distributing the product to other Asian markets (Figueiredo; Villarino; Walendorff, 2025). In addition, progress in these negotiations could facilitate the entry of Brazilian beef into countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Turkey, which still impose restrictions on national protein.
The visit to Hanoi was also aimed at strengthening relations with a strategic player in the debate on changes to US foreign trade policies. As part of the major global value chains that extend beyond the Asia-Pacific region, Vietnam has a considerable trade surplus with the US, with figures of more than 100 billion dollars by 2024, which has made the Southeast Asian country a target for Donald Trump’s tariff policy. The recent package announced by the president, justified by the need to reduce the country’s trade deficits, imposed tariffs of 46% on Vietnamese products. This measure is supported by the argument that Vietnam applies tariffs of up to 90% on American goods, generating trade tensions between the two countries (Bolzani, 2025).
Despite its interest in finding a negotiated way out with Washington, admitting to favoring measures that would reduce the deficit for Americans, the Vietnamese government also defends multilateralism and free trade, amplifying the voices that, to a greater or lesser extent, fear the impacts of American measures. Geopolitical factors also influence the search for a less turbulent way out in the face of US interest. Tensions with Beijing, especially due to the Asian superpower’s claims in the South China Sea, require Hanoi to preserve its strategic partnership with the US, ensuring a balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region that guarantees its security and sovereignty.
In this context of challenges and opportunities for international trade, Lula’s recent travel reinforces the history of rapprochement between Brazil and Vietnam. During the meeting, the Brazilian president invited Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính to visit Brazil in 2025, on the occasion of the BRICS Summit in Rio de Janeiro. With an eye on the process of expanding the multilateral initiative, which has Indonesia as a formal and effective member as well as Malaysia and Thailand as partner countries, closer relations with Vietnam also appear to be a new and conscious step by emerging countries to expand their presence in a strategic area of the globe.
More than specific considerations about this trip, this commentary also proposes to reflect on an important vector of the foreign policy of the Third Lula administration. This is Lula’s fifth visit to the Asian continent since taking office as president (Alencar; Maia, 2025). In addition to China and Japan, countries such as Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, India, and Saudi Arabia have been on the president’s itinerary for intercontinental actions.
Asia accounts for more than 40% of Brazil’s total exports and is one of the largest potential vectors of the current foreign policy of the Lula administration (Alegretti, 2025). Among the current president’s main campaign pledges, the prospect of Brazil’s reinsertion into the defense of a multipolar order from a revisionist perspective and the recovery of the country’s leading role in different multilateral agendas, such as the environment, democracy, and human rights, has stimulated the development of universalist and autonomist foreign insertion proposals (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, 2022). In addition, conjunctural challenges involving the oscillations experienced by the Brazilian economy, political instability at the domestic level, and the consequences of almost ten years of setbacks in the country’s international insertion were among the domestic vectors mobilized in favor of a sense of change in foreign policy, based on the experience of President Lula himself during his first two terms in office at the beginning of the 21st century (Santos, 2023).
The fact is that amidst a very unstable international scenario, in addition to other factors such as the divergences within the government itself regarding external action strategies, the priority given to domestic agendas, as well as the country’s political-institutional situation, have increased the challenges for developing a more solid foreign policy. If, to a large extent, Brazil managed to free itself from a condition of near-pariah status in the global system, an aspect experienced years ago, the current government finds it somewhat difficult to regain that desired prominence, which is very evident on the African continent, where, in the face of strategic competition involving actors of different statures, the Lula government continues to play catch-up.
In the case of the Asian continent, what is observed is an attempt to get closer to so-called new emerging economies. Countries with high economic growth, active participation in major regional and global decision-making processes, interest in diversifying political and economic partnerships, potential markets to be further explored by Brazil, and actors capable of projecting investments into our territory. These are characteristics that, to a greater or lesser extent, make Lula and his ministers’ trips to Asia in recent years an important movement in our foreign policy. It should also be noted that the diversification of partnerships in the context of the geoeconomic confrontation between China and the United States has become a shrewd Brazilian strategy to avoid geopolitical alignments and expanding conditions for maximizing gains.
This process takes on the meanings of continuity and discontinuity in relation to the past decade. If we observe more closely, Asia continued to be a vector in the Temer and Bolsonaro governments. In the first case, referencing the famous document “Bridge to the Future,” the idea of valuing economic diplomacy, based clearly on the deepening of neoliberalism, had in the perspective of increasing trade and integrating Brazil into the major global value chains factors that could maintain some interest in China and East Asia. In the Bolsonaro government, this perspective coexisted with strong ideological tensions. However, in the Asian West, Brazil cultivated a certain rapprochement with the Gulf States, fostering expectations about attracting powerful Saudi and Emirati Investment Funds to the country, growing commercial relations, and political collaboration on controversial agendas.
Given the heterogeneous nature of its political base, what is observed in the Lula government is the recovery of a geopolitical dimension for such relations. This is evident in the case of the Gulf. Taking Saudi Arabia as an example, prospects for the growth of trade relations by up to 20 billion dollars in the coming years are accompanied by announcements of investments in areas such as mining and energy, cooperation in security and defense, agreements to facilitate visa acquisition, and a tightening of dialogue on major global issues, including the invitation for Riyadh’s participation in BRICS. In the case of the United Arab Emirates, the main source of direct foreign investments from the Middle East in Brazil, partnerships extend to various areas, including diplomatic training, the possibility of joint cooperation on the African continent, increased participation of Brazilian companies in the most dynamic markets of the Arab World, and progress in the development of instruments linked to paradiplomacy.
The two cases illustrate the strategic importance of Asia within Brazil’s external insertion objectives in the short, medium, and long terms. According to various perspectives on contemporary international relations, such as the contributions of Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Robert Cox, the future of the world is increasingly directed towards the Asia-Pacific axis, with an economic power that is increasingly translating into geopolitical strength capable of leading or at least assertively influencing the main challenges of the current context of systemic crisis.
Even in the 2000s, Amado Cervo pointed out that “dealing with Asia is dealing with diversity” (2008, p. 275). Amid a variety of development experiences and international insertion, this continent has become an attractive factor for Brazilian Foreign Policy, especially in the context of seeking new partnerships. Throughout this history, countries like China, India, and Japan have become important destinations for Brazilian diplomacy, and the challenge of diversification still presents itself as a necessity in contemporary times. From this perspective, gestures towards the Gulf and Southeast Asia can be favorable in the process of expanding relations between Brazil and the dynamic regions of the heterogeneous continent.
The windows of opportunity that are currently presenting themselves and are being cultivated by the Lula government on that continent need to translate into efforts to overcome various difficulties, such as geographical distance, the need for facilitation of payment and credit organizations, logistics, the limited knowledge between different cultures and markets, and the involvement of non-state actors within these enterprises. Using an expression from President Juscelino Kubitschek, when Brazil was struggling by supporting colonial powers and reducing part of its external actions to a posture subordinate to the USA and the more general theses of the Cold War, we need to seek a kind of constant new Brazil-Asia Operation, crossing the Pacific in search of a world that, in the eyes of Brazilian diplomacy, seems to be an object of eternal rediscovery.
Mateus Santos is a PhD candidate in History at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPEL). Researcher-Member of the Laboratory of Geopolitics, International Relations, and Anti-systemic Movements (LabGRIMA), with an emphasis on Contemporary Brazilian Foreign Policy and the Middle East.
Glauco Winkel is a researcher at the Laboratory of Geopolitics, International Relations and Anti-systemic Movements (LabGRIMA) at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPEL), with an emphasis on China and Southeast Asia.
References
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