Trunov Philipp Olegovich – Ph.D. in Political Sciences, Leading Researcher INION RAS
The article analyses the state of German bilateral relations with South America’ states in defense and security field. The decline in the dialogue between Germany and Latin America’ countries during the COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be more significant than in other regional areas. The key reason is the difficulties in strengthening German strategic positions on the continent in the second half of the 2010. The paper stresses the functional and geographical narrowness of German political and diplomatic opportunities. In the military sphere the cooperation was mainly reduced to the export of weapons produced in Germany. In its attempts to create strategic positions in South America official Berlin has traditionally focused on strengthening relations with Brazil. The factor of non-diversification of Germany’s regional contacts has been fully manifested in the situation of stagnation and degradation of German-Brazilian relations in the second half of the 2010-s. The reasons of it are not only the specificities of president J. Bolsonaro`s foreign policy, but also the fact that transition to the declared new levels of cooperation (strategic partnership since 2008, the launch of interstate consultations format in 2015) was not supported by a corresponding increase of the volumes of practical cooperation in the field of security and defense. In this context the author focuses on relaunching German-Brazilian bilateral relations as well as the FRG attempts to make dialogue with Argentine, Chile and Mexico more active. At the same time Berlin tries to increase efforts for ensuring peace in Columbia and for settlement of the situation around Venezuela. Failures in creating its own vaccine against COVID-19 did not allow Germany to use a potential «window of opportunity» in strengthening its strategic positions in Latin America.
Germany, diplomacy, negotiations, military export, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia
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