Aspirational Power: Brazil on the Long Road to Global Influence. David R. Mares and Harold A. Trinkunas. The Brookings Institution Press. 2016.

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Despite Washington’s rebuff, Brazilian diplomacy and the trilateral accord demonstrated that there was a road to reaching agreement with Tehran to curb the weaponisation of Iran’s uranium enrichment programme. This experience raises a critical question for Mares and Trinkunas, but one they do not answer: did Brazil’s non-proliferation diplomacy contribute to bringing about the necessary conditions for framing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the P5+1 and Iran in 2015?

Aspirational Power does provide a well-argued appraisal of Brazil’s economic development diplomacy during recent decades. The authors describe the Brazilian government’s critical leadership related to the Declaration on the Agreement of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and Public Health in 2001 to confront the HIV/AIDs epidemic by pressuring multinational pharmaceutical firms with compulsory licensing to lower prices for treatment. Brazil partnered with South Africa, India and Thailand to make the case for patient rights under the TRIPS agreement. These collective diplomatic efforts eventually flipped the US position to adopt national security and public health-related exceptions to the TRIPS intellectual property protections.

Yet, while the authors present this case as emblematic of the possibilities of Brazilian international trade diplomacy and soft power, they do not apply the same logic to an analysis of the ‘Cotton Dispute’ at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which shattered the foundational myth underlying the US global leadership of trade liberalisation. Mares and Trinkunas explore Brazil’s strategies for creating a fair international trading system by establishing the Common Market of South America (Mercosul) and exercising leadership in the WTO, including electing its ambassador, Roberto Azevedo, as Director-General. Evaluation of these strategies requires analysis of Brazil’s struggle to lessen the world market distortions caused by US and European Union agricultural policies and programmes. Mares and Trinkunas examine Brazilian leadership of the G20 member-states at the WTO Cancun Ministerial negotiations in 2003, but they do not offer a synthesised interpretation anchored to the country’s pivotal role in the TRIPS negotiations over public health exceptions and the country’s decision to openly confront the EU’s sugar programme and the US cotton production subsidies and agricultural commodity export credit guarantees in the months leading up to the Cancun meeting. They highlight Brazil’s representation of both commodity exporting and subsistence agriculture member-states at the WTO, but do not weigh the extent to which Brazil’s trade diplomacy shaped the global political economy through its leadership at the WTO.

What Mares and Trinkunas do offer is an indispensable evaluation of Brazil’s rocky road to global influence. The authors effectively explain why Brazil has not yet consolidated a domestic economic and political foundation for gaining influence, paying the costs and creating the opportunities associated with a successful path toward global leadership. Their book provides a careful, even sympathetic, account of Brazil’s national faults and inability to consolidate a sustainable process of economic development under democracy to finance and inspire the national struggle to make the rules of the global order. The authors even offer up a menu of national policy options that Brazilian foreign policymakers and scholars should consider and debate (177-79).

Aspirational Power raises fundamental questions about the global order and Brazil’s place in it. It offers a comprehensive and comparable analytical framework for soft power that deserves expanded scholarly application and debate. Mares and Trinkunas may underestimate the analytical importance of the cases of the trilateral nuclear fuel exchange accord and the ‘Cotton Dispute’ at the WTO, but their book is a study of soft power in the global order that will likely become a central work of Brazilian foreign policy scholarship for decades to come.