Jon Snow is not the only one in Brazil this week. While he is there exploring Brazil’s response to climate change, Middle Eastern leaders have also been flying in for some high profile visits.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva – Lula to you and I – has been hosting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Brasilia this week. Lula is defending Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy for “peaceful purposes” and promises to visit Iran himself next spring.
Its part of new international push by Brazil. Earlier this month both Shimon Peres from Israel and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority were guests at the presidential palace.
Brazil is clearly trying to demonstrate that it has diplomatic muscle that can extend beyond the shores of South America. And presumably Lula hopes that being seen to get involved in problems like the Middle East peace process will help his campaign to get a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
If they achieved that it would be the perfect hat trick for Brazil – after winning the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.
You will remember how Lula audaciously stole those Olympics from right under the nose of President Obama who was lobbying for Chicago to host them. And the American president is not delighted by the company Lula has been keeping recently either.
The US don’t think that seeing Ahmadinejed swanning about foreign capitals is at all helpful to their efforts to pressure Iran over their nuclear programme. Brazil seems to think that getting themselves noticed in this way is helpful to their desire for a higher international profile.
Arch Conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan reckons it is a deliberate poke in the eye to Obama from Lula. He lists other recent Brazilian slights against America here, along with all the ways he thinks Obama is being dissed by other countries too.
He argues Russia not responding in kind to the American promise not to site anuclear weapons shields in Poland and the Czech Republic or Israel’s’ refusal to completely halt settlement building in the West Bank shows that Obama’s foreign policy isn’t working
Republicans are bound to jump on issues like these for their own political gain. But its is true that over a year after global celebrations greeted Obama’s election, the new face America is showing to the world doesn’t seem to have changed the results as much as he has changed the approach.
The White House respond by saying the diplomatic initiatives President Obama is engaged in are very long term projects. That they never expected, for instance, to return from China last week with any concrete promises on Chinese currency movements that could help the US economy to recover. That visit was just the first step in a much longer journey apparently.
But the US electoral process won’t wait. It may only just over one year since Obama’ election but it is also less than year until the mid term elections and here in America it feels like that campaign has started already. And that Democrats are already bracing for significant losses in both the House of reps and the Senate.
Having a president whose domestic approval rating has just dropped below 50 per cent for the first time will not help.