Brazil and China: Trade Dependence and the Contest for Influence Between Washington and Beijing
Event Description: As strategic competition between the United States and China intensifies under the Trump administration, Brazil faces growing pressure to navigate a more transactional and fragmented international order. This talk examines the evolving US-China-Brazil triangle, focusing on trade, investment, technology, critical minerals, and industrial policy. It explores how Brasília can preserve strategic autonomy while managing its deep economic relationship with China, responding to Washington’s renewed hemispheric ambitions, and using Brazil’s assets to expand its room for maneuver. Rather than treating Brazil as merely caught between two great powers, the discussion emphasizes the country’s agency, leverage, and constraints in shaping this triangular relationship.
Speaker Bio: Fernanda Magnotta, PhD, is a Senior Fellow at the Brazil Institute and the German Marshall Fund in Washington, DC, as well as at the Brazilian Center for International Relations, CEBRI. A specialist in US foreign policy and US-China-Latin America relations, she coordinates the International Relations program at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, FAAP, in São Paulo, and serves as an international affairs analyst for CNN Brasil. She is also a member of the Editorial Council of FUNAG. Magnotta was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the University of Southern California and a visiting professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.
This event is co-sponsored by the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies & the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS).
Registration is required for all individuals not affiliated with Columbia University.
