Introduction

This chapter will analyse how Brazil and the United States reached agreements on ethanol issues in a time frame dating back to the beginning of the first Lula government (1 January 2003) to the end of the first term of President Dilma Rousseff (31 December 2014). The ethanol diplomacy between the two countries played a special role in their relationship. As was shown in the literature review in Chapter 3, the two countries have lived through ups and downs in their bilateral relationship. The early 2000s was a particularly difficult period, when Brazil was on the rise and looking towards a levelled position regarding the United States but with generally diverging interests and positions regarding questions of security, trade and South American governance. In that sense, the structural conditions for an agreement cannot be seen as particularly permissive; however, the attitudes of the leadership of the two countries that wanted and needed to show diplomatic successes added a very beneficial element. This chapter will examine whether the 2007 biofuels MoU between the United States and Brazil constitutes a new period of good relations or merely one light in a sea of darkness. It will first establish an initial account of the structural relations between the countries, the most obvious one being the structural disadvantage that Brazil has towards the United States, but also include attitudes towards each other in their respective foreign policies. This will be followed by a mapping of the actors and institutions involved in the process, which effectively means drawing out the components of the respective foreign policy complex (FPC). Finally, I will track the developments towards the 2007 MoU on biofuels, assess its outcomes and its implementation phase up to the NSA spy scandal. The process tracing will end at the end of President Dilma Rousseff's (in the following ‘Dilma’) first term as president of Brazil with an assessment of the rapprochement between the two countries. To conclude this chapter, I will summarise the findings and describe the mechanisms that directed the two countries’ negotiation strategies and relationship in general terms and therefore the outcomes of their ethanol diplomacy.