The United States and Argentina in Brazil’s Wartime Foreign Policy, 1939–1945

Abstract

Nothing so distinguished Brazilian from Argentine strategic thought during the early decades of the twentieth century as the role assigned to the USA and Pan-Americanism in the former. Whereas the Argentine foreign policy elite saw American influence as detrimental to national interests and resisted tenaciously the concept of Pan-Americanism espoused by Washington — ‘No country in South America’, one scholar aptly has noted, ‘has caused the United States Department of State more anguish during the twentieth century than has Argentina.’1 Brazilian leaders, propounding a ‘natural allies’ thesis based on apparently similar historical experiences in relations with Spanish America, territorial size, and economic complementarity, regarded a special relationship with the USA as vital to Brazilian security vis-a-vis historic adversary Argentina and viewed the corollary of hemispheric solidarity as indispensable to protection from European predators.2 Underlying the divergent strategic convictions of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro were commercial realities. Argentina’s exports, mainly beef and cereals, were competitive with those of the USA and she found her major market in Britain. Brazil, on the other hand, had its principal client in the USA which, except when Nazi Germany edged slightly past in 1938, was also the leading source of Brazil’s imports.