To lead or not to lead: regional powers and regional leadership

Recent trends demonstrate that states with sufficient capabilities to be granted regional power status by its peers (primarily other states within their region) can nonetheless renounce regional leadership. This article analyzes the puzzling behavior of these detached or reluctant regional powers. We argue that resorting to an approach grounded in neoclassical realism is helpful to explain why regional powers might not exercise leadership. In this article regional leadership is conceptualized as an auxiliary goal within the grand strategy of a regional power. This goal will be pursued in the absence of certain structural and domestic constraints. Great power competition determines the incentives for regional leadership at the structural level. Capacity to extract and mobilize resources for foreign policy affects the decision to pursue leadership at the domestic level. We apply the analytical framework to analyze Brazil’s detachment from South America after the Cardoso and Lula presidencies

Was the Falklands crisis a war of distraction? A reinterpretation of the Argentine decline through prospective theory

How do we explain the Falklands War? In this article we revisit this episode through a counterfactual analysis using recently declassified documents. These sources cast additional doubt over the diversionary war and miscalculation theses. The evidence suggest that long-term power dynamics and psychological biases affecting the members of the Argentine military Junta better explain the decisions that led to the war

Myths of Multipolarity: The Sources of Brazil's Foreign Policy Overstretch

In this article, we provide a framework to analyze the foreign policy overstretch of middle powers, that is, their recent tendency to expand foreign policy goals and ambitions beyond their capabilities. We propose that overstretch results from the interaction of permissive international environments and the collusion of domestic actors to produce foreign policy myths. These myths, in turn, justify unsustainable swelling of foreign policy expenditures until they are shattered. After laying out our theory, we test it against the case of twenty-first-century Brazil. First, we document how interest groups logrolled to foster and capitalize on a “myth of multipolarity,” which, once entrenched in elite discourse and public opinion, resulted in a tangible overgrowth of foreign policy. Second, we show the extent of overstretch across four indicators—number of embassies, participation in peacekeeping operations, membership in international organizations, and aid projects overseas—using the synthetic control method to compare Brazil with a plausible counterfactual

Latin American regionalism faces the rise of Brazil

In the last two decades, Brazil has emerged as a global actor. Its rise is embodied in such acronyms as BRICS (Btazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa), and BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China), which include emerging states from several world regions. Brazil's emergence has been an unintended outcome of its foreign policy, not because the government did not seek international recognition but because it planned to reach it through regional blocs rather than transregional alliances. There are two reasons for this unpredicted result: first, Brazil has been widening the gap with its neighbours; second, the organizations it has created as regional means to global ends have not delivered as expected. This chapter analyses Brazil's regional strategies and the region,s reactions along three dimensions: power struggle (politics), interest coordination (policy), and community building (polity). It shows that most South American neighbours have followed Brazil,s lead only in exchange for material compensation, which has been limited and sporadic, and have either dragged their feet (as in the Common Market of the South (MERCosuR)) or created alternative organizations (such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) or the pacific Alliance) rather than bandwagoning (as in the union of south American Nations (UNASUR)) when there was little on offer