1 Thinking Through Brazil’s Strategic Leadership Gap Sean Burges Australian National University / Carleton University Sean.burges@anu.edu.au / seanburges@yahoo.com Pre-publication text for chapter published in Daniel Flemes and Hannes Ebert, eds. (2018), Regional Powers and Contested Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan). ABSRACT: This chapter argues that Brazil’s emergence has only been partial due to a lack of forward strategic thinking by the country’s foreign policy establishment. Tracing back to the 1993 foreign policy review Reflexões Sobre a Política Externa Brasileira, this article will argue that despite Brazil’s surge onto the world scene little has taken place in the way of revisiting and rethinking key concepts underlying its international interactions. Leadership, the chapter will argue, requires the leader not only assume costs, but also engage in activities potentially unpalatable to the led. For Brazil this is a challenge because there has not been a review of what traditional policies such as non- interventionism, autonomy, and a maximalist approach to sovereignty imply for a country that would be a leader. Introduction: During a 2001 research interview with a Brazilian diplomat I was advised to search out a copy of the draft 1993 Itamaraty report Reflexões Sobre a Política Externa Brasileira (IPRI, 1993). There, I was promised, I would find the core principles, concepts, and ambitions of Brazilian foreign policy mapped out, explained, and contextualized. Nothing of substance had since changed, assured the diplomat, since then foreign minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso launched the review to update and plan Brazil’s foreign policy strategy for a post-Cold War era and domestic context of rapidly consolidating democratic governance. The 351-page document did not disappoint, although it appears to have received only a limited formal release to the public. For a period in the early 2000s it was retrievable online if you knew the correct Google search string, but then disappeared for nearly a decade prior to its 2015 re-posting by the in-house Itamaraty think tank the Fundação Alexandre Gusmão. What is clear from the document is that the idea of Brazil as a leader in South America and the wider South was an appealing ambition in the early 1990s. More significantly, the kind of revisiting of core ambitions and priorities set out in the Reflexões report does not appear to have taken place in a manner that addresses the subsequent major changes in Brazil’s specific circumstances. This, it will be argued here, is something that should be noted by students of Brazilian foreign policy and does much to explain the apparent failures in regional leadership plans and global engagement ambitions. There is a growing body of critical scholarship that directly questions the success of Brazil’s foreign policy. Suggestions abound that the flurry of activity seen during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) and Luiz Iganacio ‘Lula’ da Silva (2003-2010)