A Comparative Analysis of Brazil's Foreign Policy Drivers Towards the USA: Comment on Amorim Neto (2011)

This paper looks at the main finding by Amorim Neto (2011), namely that Brazil's power explains why it distanced itself from the country that had once been its great ally in the first half of the last century. We propose an alternative explanation grounded on the realist literature in IR. Ultimately, we seek to determine whether the variable has behaved in the same way for other South American countries, searching for independent variables that could help us explain a visible pattern in the region: the increasing distancing from the United States (USA) at the United Nations General Assembly. We want to contribute to the debate initiated by Amorim Neto (2011) and Schenoni (2012) for future research in the recent field of quantitative analysis of Brazilian Foreign Policy. Using Panel Corrected Standard Error analysis in ten South American countries from 1970 to 2007 we empirically prove that the lower the power gap between a South American country and the U.S., the lower its alignment with the USA in the UN General Assembly voting.