Dilma Rousseff, the former president of Brazil leaves the Alvorada Palace, the presidential residence after her impeachment by the country’s Senate in Brasilia on Sept. 6.ADRIANO MACHADO/Reuters
The first and last time I encountered Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's former president, was at the very height of her power. It was March, 2013, and she had travelled to Durban, South Africa, along with the leaders of Russia, India, China and the host nation, in order to attend a meeting of a Goldman-Sachs-minted supergroup called BRICS. Xi Jinping, Manmohan Singh, Jacob Zuma and a terrifyingly Botoxed, pocket-sized Vladimir Putin glared down the media pool with menace. But no one glared better than Rousseff. She had behind her the might of some 200 million Brazilians; a GDP that was growing at an average of 4 per cent a year; the backing of her superstar predecessor, Lula da Silva; and the steadfast belief from global policy wonks that everything Brazil had done since 2003 was God's answer to the question of how best to fix a broken planet.
Rousseff struck me as the presidential equivalent of Dwayne Johnson; it was as if her eyes could fire laser-guided daisy cutters into the crowd. She spoke of national upward mobility, of a rising South, of a New World Order. A newly formed BRICS bank, we were told, would serve as notice to the Bretton Woods cabal, and as the first serious alternative to Western financial hegemony. Turkey, Indonesia, Thailand, Mexico, Nigeria: Soon these enormous, thriving and increasingly powerful countries would link up with BRICS to form a brilliant new acronym, acting as a ballast against waves of neo-colonial imperialism.
But if a week is a long time in politics, a nanosecond is an eon in geopolitics. A year later, Rousseff won a second term with a comfortable majority – which, as it turned out, was her death knell. She has since been ousted and impeached by a right-winger who himself has been impeached, and following what constitutes a soft coup by the country's white hyper-class, the entire Brazilian project is in free fall. As for the rest of the BRICS, they too are crumbling. Since last I shivered in Putin's presence, he has invaded Ukraine, fallen in love with Donald Trump and presided over an economy in utter tailspin. Xi Jinping is duct-taping together the Chinese economic transition, while erasing the last traces of a link between the free market and democracy. Jacob Zuma runs a flailing South Africa like a sad New Jersey mob racket. The less said about the rest of BRICSTITMN, the better.
What on Earth happened?
Well, rather a lot. In a new book called The Fix: How Nations Survive and Thrive in a World in Decline, Jonathan Tepperman travels the planet in search of case studies that can serve as solutions. Caveat emptor: Books carry the inherent limitations of old tech, and Tepperman conducted his research before the current emerging market implosion – and the damn thing refuses to update itself. That shouldn't matter, because The Fix concerns timeless solutions. But statecraft is all about context, and there are no such things as timeless solutions.
Still. Tepperman is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, that sober and reliable mouthpiece of the American foreign-relations establishment, and it is his contention that even while the world goes swiftly and emphatically to hell, there remain technocratic pathways to heaven. That these solutions exist within the confines of the current system – a tasty jus drizzled over meat-and-potatoes neoliberalism – Tepperman seems to take as so obvious that it doesn't even rate a mention.
The Fix wants us to understand that "the right individuals can overcome the most intimidating obstacles – if they follow the right strategies." The World Economic Forum talk-shop circuit has long promulgated a mash-up of charismatic leadership and institutional "deliverology;" in this, Tepperman's book serves as the hadiths to the establishment's Koran. The 10 chapters, all detailing a specific leadership in a specific country, are, he writes, a "testament to the power of people who get things done."
So, who gets things done? Well, Rwanda's Paul Kagame gets things done. (Kagame is a favourite of the current crop of deliverologists, who see a sparklingly clean country full of people not committing genocide, and mistake it for the result of sound developmental policies. Kagame tends to outsource the murdering of his political enemies to assassins who ply their trade in a hotel only a few miles from my Johannesburg home, so I find Rwanda-philia a bit wearying.) Canada's progressive immigration policies, initiated by Trudeau I, get things done. (Tepperman is very good when he stays close to home – this chapter is the book's finest.) Three successive Indonesian presidents, in dealing with the local brand of violent Islamism, have gotten things done.
All of this amounts to a glorious self-help tome for policy wonks, which means Trudeau II and his cheery band of advisers would likely file The Fix under "must-read." But Tepperman's book, which is often engaging and thought-provoking, finds him unwilling – I'd argue, unable – to stray even slightly off a centrist, Clintonesque path.
This is nowhere more true than of his Brazilian chapter, which centres on Lula's adoption of the famous Bolsa Familia social program. Bolsa's signature idea was to disburse sums of money to the matriarchs of the country's poorest families, in exchange for their children meeting early-development benchmarks. But the program, for all its rousing rhetoric and very real success, was specific to a time and place: a massive country enjoying an unprecedented commodities boom. What's more, although it originated with a leftist government, it didn't aim to realign the system that kept more than 100 million Brazilians in poverty – it didn't change Brazil so much as further entrench its ancien régime power structures. We know this because the right-wing backlash has been more vicious, petulant and misguided than anyone could have imagined.
Tepperman's book was likely churning through the galley stages as the political knives sank into Rousseff's flesh, and there is no question that Bolsa Familia can provide something of a mainframe for other countries looking to integrate their poorest citizens into the consumption economy. But it is precisely the decisions Tepperman praises – Lula's subtle blending of hard neoliberal doctrine and soft social democracy, to say nothing of his "pragmatic centrism" – that augured the country's present implosion. As the Worker's Party grew in strength, and as Lula's silky politicking sucked in (and co-opted) labour, indigenous movements, women's-rights advocates and the remainder of Brazil's polite civil-society initiatives, it opened its left flank to parries from the virulently right-wing media, and the white upper-class members of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, who saw their influence evaporating.
The real lesson from Lula-era Brazil is not the technocratic wizardry behind Bolsa Familia, but how a once-in-a-generation opportunity to completely alter the political makeup was squandered by entrenched interests and the power of the status quo. There was zero goodwill from the right, and Lula naively believed that the commodities boom (and therefore year-on-year increases in national prosperity) would be endless, obviating the need for him to politically slay his enemies.
In this, Tepperman has not written a technocrat's version of Sun Tzu's The Art of War, but rather The Art of the Tummy Rub. It's a rollicking read, and there's much to learn from it, but it's far too tame to fix a world this cruel, and this dysfunctional.
Richard Poplak's most recent book is Continental Shift: A Journey into Africa's Changing Fortunes, co-written with Kevin Bloom. He lives in Toronto and Johannesburg.