How not to make friends and not to influence people.

247 - The images speak for themselves. The meeting between Barack Obama and Dilma Rousseff at the White House highlighted the unease between the two presidents. Stern faces, truncated answers, and gestures and words that made explicit the lack of mutual empathy. While covering Dilma's visit to Washington, the Spanish newspaper El Pais pointed out that, contrary to expectations, Obama did not offer a gala dinner to the Brazilian president – ​​Dilma ended up having dinner at the Brazilian embassy. Perhaps these are natural tensions after Brazil began to have greater aspirations on the international stage. But the undeniable fact is that the Obama who embraced former President Lula at a G-20 meeting in London and labeled him "the man" showed no affinity whatsoever with President Dilma, despite a formal exchange of pleasantries.

There are several explanations for this. The first is the lack of a concrete agenda between the two countries. Since the collapse of the Free Trade Area of ​​the Americas (FTAA), Brazil and the United States have had no strategic points to discuss in the economic sphere. Furthermore, the two countries also disagree on issues such as Iran's nuclear program and the imposition of sanctions on Syria. To complete the adverse picture, Dilma Rousseff delivered to the United States the same speech she had given a month earlier in Germany to Chancellor Angela Merkel: that rich countries were provoking a "monetary tsunami" with an expansionary monetary policy. By adopting low interest rates and issuing currency to combat the internal recession, the United States would create a flood of dollars and cause investors to seek more attractive returns in emerging countries. This phenomenon would be appreciating the real, reducing the competitiveness of Brazilian exports, and allowing for so-called interest rate arbitrage between the two countries. In short, this is the essence of what Dilma and the Finance Minister, Guido Mantega, define as a "currency war."

Obama heard Dilma's complaints, but evidently paid them no attention. Running for re-election in the presidential elections this November, his main challenge is to pull his country out of the economic crisis it has been in since 2008. And certainly, he couldn't do that with high interest rates. The same applies to Angela Merkel, who leads an economy that is the heart of a struggling Europe, where several countries are on the verge of bankruptcy. If Brazil is truly bothered by the arbitrage of interest rates here and abroad, it could do its part by further reducing the Selic rate and cutting public spending.

Distorted view of reality

In a way, Brazil's stance towards countries like Germany and the United States reflects a distorted view of reality, created after the 2008 crisis. Because rich countries entered a crisis and Brazil remained largely unaffected, it was imagined that the country had great lessons to teach the world. This stance and this type of discourse have not pleased Dilma's main interlocutors. And smiles, as well as empathy, are still important in international relations. After two trips without concrete results, it is now up to Brazil to consider, perhaps, putting on the sandals of humility.