
Both the Brazilian and U.S. governments billed President Dilma Rousseff’s late June meeting with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden in Washington as a reset of relations between the Western Hemisphere’s two largest democracies. Revelations in 2013 by NSA contractor Edward Snowden of U.S. eavesdropping on Brazilian officials, including Rousseff herself, caused her to cancel her state visit scheduled for that October, putting bilateral relations on ice for almost two years. Arguably, Brazil and the United States had already been on separate tracks for some time prior to that, given Brasilia’s more assertively independent foreign policy under the […]