The New York Times.

News Analysis

Brazil and U.S. Accentuate the Positive

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and President Obama spoke with reporters in the Oval Office after meeting for two hours.

By SIMON ROMERO and JACKIE CALMES

Published: April 9, 2012

RIO DE JANEIRO — Dilma Rousseff’s first visit to Washington as Brazil’s president was certainly cordial enough.

Enlarge This Image

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

President Dilma Rousseff echoed President Obama's calls for economic cooperation between the countries. 

She had lunch at the White House on Monday with President Obama. The United States said it was opening two new consulates in Brazil in an effort to lure more free-spending Brazilian tourists. And the two countries even forged an agreement to bolster the trade of cachaça, Brazil’s signature sugarcane tipple, and Tennessee whiskey. 

But the friendliness belied a sense that the United States, whose once-dominant sway in Latin America is ebbing, and Brazil, the hemisphere’s rising power, still do not see eye to eye on a range of important issues, from Middle East diplomacy to trade with Cuba and Brazil’s ambitions of obtaining a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. 

“Brazil sees itself as having arrived or close to arriving,” said Peter Hakim, president emeritus of the Inter-American Dialogue, a research and policy organization in Washington. “The United States sees Brazil as big, the most important country in Latin America, but not anything like a global power.”

This disconnect was revealed in one account after another in the news media here about the visit, in which commentators lamented the fact that Ms. Rousseff was not received with the pomp of a White House state dinner, recognition granted by the Obama administration to the leaders of South Korea, India and Britain. 

“The bilateral reality is far from being a disgrace, despite the points in dispute, but there’s a considerable lack of mutual respect,” Caio Blinder, a columnist for the magazine Veja, said in an essay describing the “downgrade” of Ms. Rousseff’s visit. 

Still, both governments emphasized the positive aspects of Ms. Rousseff’s visit, which came a year after Mr. Obama visited Brazil. The level of diplomatic exchanges, sharing of classified military and defense information and overall trade is far more expansive than in some other parts of Latin America, like Venezuela and Ecuador, where relations remain at a low point. 

The United States does not have a trade agreement with Brazil, despite reaching such deals with 11 other countries in Latin America, but trade with Brazil, which recently surpassed Britain as the world’s sixth-largest economy, is nevertheless thriving. 

At one point this year, the United States surpassed China as Brazil’s top export market, because of rising purchases of Brazilian oil and manufactured goods. By the end of the first quarter of this year, China regained the top spot, but the relationship is not without problems, with tensions emerging over cheap Chinese imports and land acquisition by Chinese investors. 

Meanwhile, the United States had a trade surplus of over $8 billion with Brazil in 2011, reflecting a surge of American exports into Latin America’s largest country. Faced with rising land and labor costs, Brazil, a biofuels powerhouse, even imported a record 1.1 billion liters, about 264 million gallons, of ethanol from the United States last year. 

But these trade patterns disguise tension. The strength of Brazil’s currency, the real, has been a blessing for Brazilians snapping up properties in Miami and New York. At the same time, the real’s vigor has limited the competitiveness of Brazilian exporters by making their products costlier in foreign markets. 

Mr. Obama and Ms. Rousseff met privately for two hours at the White House, and afterward sat in the Oval Office to speak briefly with reporters. Mr. Obama effused about “the extraordinary progress that Brazil has made under President Rousseff.” Ms. Rousseff echoed his calls for continued economic cooperation between the countries. 

Ms. Rousseff also cited oil and gas production as “a tremendous opportunity for further cooperation,” with the United States both supplying equipment and know-how to extract the energy sources, and then buying some of the product. She welcomed the recent American reductions in tariffs on Brazil’s ethanol. 

Yet the leaders’ eyes rarely met, and Ms. Rousseff rarely looked at Mr. Obama as he spoke. He looked intently at her during her remarks, nodding in agreement at times. But he seemed to bristle when she expressed concern that America’s “monetary expansion policy” could impair growth in emerging economies like Brazil’s. Monetary policy is the responsibility of the Federal Reserve; the White House and Congress deal with fiscal policy. 

No breakthroughs were revealed regarding Brazil’s policies in the Middle East, which seem to have undergone some fine-tuning under Ms. Rousseff from those of her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who in 2010 tried to forge an ambitious uranium exchange deal with Iran. 

While Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, notably bypassed Brazil on a recent tour of Latin America, and Brazil voted recently in the United Nations to censure President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, qualms persist in Brasília about intervening in Middle East conflicts. 

Meanwhile, Washington has been reluctant to explicitly support Brazil’s bid for a permanent seat on the Security Council, even after the United States backed India’s bid two years ago. 

Brazil also supports India’s bid and argues that the Security Council should be expanded to include various new members. But Susan E. Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, criticized Brazil, as well as India and South Africa, during their temporary tenures on the Council after they blocked efforts last year to pressure Mr. Assad’s government. 

Other issues weigh on relations, like a new Florida law targeting companies that do business with Cuba by preventing local governments from hiring them. The law could complicate matters for Odebrecht, one of Brazil’s largest construction companies, which is upgrading the Port of Miami at the same time it is building Cuba’s Port of Mariel. 

Ms. Rousseff will focus on higher education, one of the brightest areas of cooperation between Brazil and the United States, in a visit on Tuesday to Harvard and M.I.T., where she will discuss Science Without Borders, a program that aims to send about 100,000 Brazilians to study at foreign universities. As many as half are expected to study in the United States.

“Science Without Borders will do more to advance relations between the two countries,” said Maurício Santoro, a professor of international relations at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, an elite university here, “than every other diplomatic agreement under discussion.” 

Simon Romero reported from Rio de Janeiro, and Jackie Calmes from Washington.