Flu into a rage: Brazil’s Bolsonaro inquiry

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. China has reportedly tested not once but twice, a terrifying combination of technologies, a faster than sound glider and nuclear capable craft that can go into orbit. We ask how the tech works and what it says about China's nuclear ambitions. And for all the firsts that Colin Powell racked up as he rose in America's halls of power, he never defined himself by his race. Our obituary's editor reflects on his unfailingly cool head and the Iraq war hawkishness that haunted him. But first, Few countries have been struck harder by COVID 19 than Brazil has. The pandemic ravaged the country from early on, particularly in the Amazon region. Even as President Jair Bolsonaro shrugged off the risk. He railed against social distancing measures and lockdowns. He called Covid a little flu. He clashed with his health ministers, who resigned or were sacked one after another. A televised inquiry into Mr. Bolsonaro's actions, led by the country's Congress, began in April and has gripped the country since. Its findings are stark.

Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of crimes against humanity for the president's handling of COVID in Brazil.

Emma Hogan is our America's editor.

The report, which was leaked this week, was compiled by a Senate committee who spent six months looking at how the president had handled the pandemic in Brazil. It's far more damning than was expected, although some of the findings have subsequently been retracted.

So what are the key findings as we currently understand it?

So the accusation that he is liable for crimes against humanity comes about because of what they call his macabre approach. The pandemic, which included organizing large gatherings of his supporters, Mocking scientists and mask wearers, and also mocking a COVID patient struggling to breathe on television. This comes at a time when Brazil has had over 600,000 excess deaths, thanks to the pandemic, according to the Economist's Excess Mortality Tracker. I mean, let's go back to the beginning of the pandemic. President Bolsonaro was one of the first world leaders to say, it's just a flu, it's fine. And to minimise the problems of COVID this had particular problems for the Brazilian indigenous community. It also meant that the P1 variant, one of the earliest variants of COVID came out of Brazil. So really, it has been incredibly poorly handled.

So what will happen with these allegations against Mr. Bolsonaro? Will there be formal charges?

Well, I mean, one of the senators behind the investigation has said the President has committed several crimes and will pay for them all. But that looks incredibly unlikely. As I mentioned, the most incendiary charges for homicide and genocide against indigenous groups have been dropped. So the President looks really quite likely to escape legal consequences for these other claims. So the report mentions two kinds of crimes, the ordinary crimes that are prosecutable under the criminal code, and the impeachable crimes of responsibility. To try the President in court requires the approval of the Attorney General, who is an ally of the President. Meanwhile, an impeachment needs the stamp of approval from the head of the lower house of Congress, who is also close to the President. So because he has these two allies, the Attorney General and the head of the lower house of Congress, it looks incredibly unlikely that these accusations in the report will actually have any legal consequence.

Well, if not, then a matter for criminal accountability. What about the court of public opinion?

Well, it's been incredibly damaging for Mr. Bolsonaro, and it comes on from a litany of problems for him. So what I found remarkable about this is that over the six months that the inquiry was taking place, it was broadcast live and regularly. Half a million people would tune in to view it, with many more others on social media also commenting and so on. And so, you know, according to one poll rating, President Bolsonaro's approval rating has fallen from about 33% to 22%, which is really very bad in the year before an election.

And do you get a sense that Mr. Bolsonaro senses that is doing something to try to win back the public?

Absolutely. President Bolsonaro is trying to boost support by increasing social welfare. Most specifically, he is trying to expand and make more generous a welfare fund associated with the former President Lula, who currently is leading the polls for the presidential election next year. Mr. Bolsonaro's plans have split his Government. His economy minister is against it, but he wants to give out some monthly benefits of about $71 to the poorest Brazilians without, he claims, violating Brazil's spending limits.

And what about the pandemic and the economy? In fact, now this report's rather backward looking. How are things looking forward?

Well, unemployment is 14% in Brazil at the moment. The central bank is increasing interest rates. Inflation has risen to a whopping 10% in the past year. So for most ordinary Brazilians, the cost of living is going up. I think that that will in the end be the really difficult test for Mr. Bolsonaro. He can expand various social welfare funds, but fundamentally people have felt very hard hit by the pandemic, both in terms of the number of deaths that have happened in Brazil, but also the economic consequences on the country.

So taken together, where do you think Mr. Bolsonaro goes from here? He seems insulated from criminal concerns, but the rest of it's up in the air.

Indeed. I mean, in many ways, Mr. Bolsonaro seems like a Teflon president. I mean, he has remained in power despite the fact that he has handled the pandemic extraordinarily badly. But even if these accusations don't stick, Mr. Bolsonaro and his sons are facing investigations into spreading fake news and corruption, all of which they deny. So next year is going to be a difficult one for Mr. Bolsonaro, and he's going to go into it with his standing significantly reduced.

Thanks very much for joining us, Emma.

My pleasure, Jason.

When it comes to doomsday scenarios, the only thing more frightening than an intercontinental nuclear weapon is an intercontinental nuclear weapon that can sneak up on you. Last weekend, the Financial Times first reported that China had over the summer tested a faster than sound glider capable of delivering nukes from space. Yesterday the paper said there had in fact been two such missions, twice. The reason to think that China's latest work could shift the world nuclear order.

China's apparent test of a hypersonic nuclear capable glider is the latest front in what is is clearly an intensifying nuclear competition between America, China and a number of other states.

Shashank Joshi is the Economist's defence editor.

China has denied that it tested a hypersonic missile. It says it only tested a reusable spacecraft. But what's very clear is that it is moving very quickly in the realm of nuclear weapons technology. And this has America really quite worried.

Well, let's talk about that technology.

What exactly is a hypersonic missile, Jason?

I think to sort of understand that, we have to talk about Intercontinental ballistic missiles, the traditional missiles, and these are very simple. They go up and they go down. It's just that they go incredibly high, over a thousand miles above the Earth's surface, and then it plunges back down to Earth. So a missile fired at America from somewhere like Russia or China, it has to go high over the North Pole in a very predictable way, which means, first of all, it would be spotted by radar systems run by America and Canada in the icy wastelands of the Arctic. And once it goes up, you pretty much know where it's coming down. The point of the weapon that China seems to have tested is that you would avoid those limitations with two different types of technology. And one of them is hypersonic gliders, and the other one is orbital weapons.

Okay, well, let's pick those apart further. Tell me about the hypersonic glider.

Part glide vehicles are also boosted up on a rocket like an ICBM is, but either they get released in the upper atmosphere before they get into space, or they go a little bit into space and then plunge back into the atmosphere very quickly. And the way they're designed means that they can then glide in the upper atmosphere, sometimes skipping along the top of it over huge distances. That has a couple of advantages. They can stay lower than icbm, so they can hide from radar given the curvature of the Earth. Right. You can't spot something that is low because the Earth is curved and they can take long and convoluted routes, which means you can avoid ground based radar. Radar, you can avoid ground based missile defences. So, you know, Jason, many people think the point of hypersonic missiles is that they go very fast. And they do. But the point is that they're fast and they are much more manoeuvrable than a traditional icbm. And so what that means is you can avoid stuff like American radar and missile defences. That's what makes them so attractive. Attractive at least if you're a Chinese dictator who doesn't want his nuclear weapons to be shot down by America.

Right. But the other thing that makes this test weapon attractive, if we're going to call it that, is the orbital nuclear weapons element of it. Tell me about that.

That's the other thing that makes this so interesting, if the reports are to be believed, it actually entered orbit around the Earth in the way that a satellite would and went all the way around the Earth and then came into the atmosphere and did the glider thing and plunged to the ground. And that makes it an orbital weapon. And we have examples of this. Right. The Soviet Union built something called A fractional orbital bombardment system in the 1960s. It operated it until the 1980s. You know, this wasn't just a crazy drawing board thing. They actually built the thing and actually had it ready to fire. The really big advantage of this is that a warhead can go into orbit the other way. If you're in Russia or you're in China, you don't have to go over the North Pole, you can go completely in the other direction, over the South Pole and strike America from the south, where it has no radar coverage. Of note, it has no missile defences. And the infrared satellites in space that spot rocket engines burning have very patchy coverage.

So from a strategic point of view, why combine these technologies in this way, do you think?

To be honest, Jason, we don't really understand. I mean, one possibility is that if the aim is to circumvent American missile defences, you sort of want to explore lots of different ways to do that. Gliders, orbital weapons. America has ground based missile defences. It has missile defences on many of its Aegis destroyers. And so you might want to hedge your bets and try different ways of dodging them, hiding from them, getting around them. Another possibility is that if you want to approach America from the south to get around those defences, the current Chinese gliders just aren't good enough. They haven't got the range. And so perhaps you need to piggyback off an orbital system that goes into orbit over the South Pole and then you have a glider that goes the last mile.

So the advantages you describe seem mainly.

To be about avoiding American missile defenses.

That, I think, is a huge concern, not just for China, also for Russia. You know, in 2002, the Bush administration tore up something called the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, and it poured a lot of money into anti missile systems. To be absolutely frank, they don't work that well. You know, if someone's firing a lot of ICBMs at you, some of them are going to get through. From a Chinese perspective, they say we have a pretty small arsenal. If America were to strike us first and wipe out a lot of our nukes on the ground, and we only had some left, and then we had to retaliate against America, what would happen if American missile defences could take those out? And basically we lost our ability to launch a second strike against the United States, that would be really bad. So a big part of their motivation, just like the motivation for Russia, is building systems, whether they are more nukes, more silos, or more exotic ways of delivering them, that essentially ensures they will always be able to get through above American cities. I think that's something that is very high up the list of priorities for strategists in Beijing or in Moscow.

What about the thinking in Washington? What will the generals there be making of this?

I think they're alarmed. They're watching China press ahead in cutting edge technology in areas where they thought they were ahead. And there's no arms control between America or China, so there's nothing to keep this in check. And, of course, the politics of military competition between America and China is getting worse and worse. Taiwan is becoming more of a flashpoint. The mood in the Pacific is becoming more tense in a number of ways. The Biden administration is now writing something called Nuclear Posture Review. It's a kind of review of nuclear policy that every president does. And I think the hope had been they would be able to move in a more dovish direction on nuclear policy. They might be able to reduce the salience and prominence of nuclear weapons in American defence policy. They might be able to emphasise arms control. I think watching all of these developments in China, new silo fields, new types of nuclear weapons, that is going to make that very difficult for the Biden administration to do, both politically and strategically.

Thanks for that, Shashank. And thanks also for taking over hosting duties next week.

Thank you, Jason. I'm looking forward to it and I will see everyone on Monday.

Colin Powell was a great man for lists of epigrams and mottos and uplifting little phrases.

Ann Roe is the Economist's obituaries editor.

One of the best he learned was in his after school job at the age of 14 in Six's Toy Store. And there his boss used to say, gesund, dein Keppel, have a healthy head in Yiddish. And this idea of having a sound head, a healthy head, a cool, rational approach to things, seemed a very good principle to Colin Powell when he first heard it, and he determined to try to live by it. He couldn't have guessed, though, at the age of 14, that he would rise to be the National Security Advisor of the United States. He would be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State. It was extraordinary that he reached such heights. And for a while he was actually the most popular man in the country because he had commanded the Desert Storm War, the first Iraq War, in 1990-91, which was a famous victory. His name began to be mentioned as a possible president both in 1996 and again in 2000. But he always seemed extremely reluctant, because where his passion truly lay was for the military life. He had first discovered that when he was at college and getting a straight C average and rather aimless, he suddenly discovered the Reserve Officer Training Corps and joined up as a military man. Though he wasn't a very easy fit in politics, he served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. With the Republicans, Reagan and Bush, he found himself a dove among the hawks in the Clinton administration. He found that he was a realist among rather starry eyed liberal internationalists. He was always extremely careful about what America should do in the world and how it should apply its power. He moved with extreme caution, and this was the result, among other things, of his time in Vietnam, when he had had to show the same caution, setting out on patrols, moving through the elephant grass, not seeing the enemy he was supposed to be engaging with. He began to first of all question why he was in Vietnam at all, because there seemed no point to it. And he began to question whether America should go to war so readily and what the rules should be for engaging in conflict.

Intense fighting, both on the ground, inside the buffer zone and in the air, sends Vietnam casualty figures to a new high heavy mortar and artillery fire.

He drew up what became known as the Powell Doctrine, which set out various rules for going to war. The first one was, had everything else been tried? War had to be a last resort. If war seemed inevitable, nothing else could be done. Was there a clear objective? Did America have the resources? Were the allies behind it? Were the people of America behind it? That had been a great problem in Vietnam, and was it in the national interest? And then, last of all, was there an exit strategy? All these rules had applied pretty well, not completely, but pretty well to the first Gulf War. But then along came both the Iraq war and Afghanistan, and this called for very difficult decisions. When the Iraq War raised its head again in 2003, Colin Powell was still keen to apply sanctions. On the other hand, President George W. Bush was very keen to get going with the war, and so were his other advisors. Colin Powell said, well, I will agree to that if you let me take it to the United nations and try to persuade the allies. At least he took it there. And I think many people remember the long, quite eloquent narration he gave of why Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were a danger to everybody.

Indeed, the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.

Unfortunately, all his diagrams and photographs and narrative were based on false intelligence. And so America went to war with a clear objective, but with a false objective. And he Never got over that. He always felt it was a blot on his record. He felt the pain even at the end of his life of having advised the community of nations to do something that was not based on the truth. Those weren't the only battles he had to fight. It was always assumed he'd had to fight a great many more because he was the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first black National Security Advisor. And this was an extraordinary achievement for him. But he didn't define himself by race. He had faced a great deal of prejudice in his life. Not so much at the beginning, because in the Bronx everyone was a minority of some sort. In the army too, everyone was valued for their valor and their merit and not for the color of their skin. But he found when he was training in the south, he couldn't sleep in motels, he couldn't go to restaurants or bars. The world seemed closed to him. He took that as a challenge while also hoping that the fact he had opened so many doors would also leave them open for other people. So the world did appear, often very frustrating to him. He wished sometimes for the stark simplicities of the Cold War, for the zero sum power games where there seemed to be a definite solution that would put paid to the problem. He had a rather interesting hobby when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State. He would rescue old clapped out Volvos and haul them back home on a rope and set to work to see if he could get them going again. He would go through them and there would be one thing that would actually get the car to start again. And he often thought as he tinkered away at these old cars, that with the broken world too, there was probably one simple solution that would set everything straight.

Ann Rowe on Colin Powell, who's died aged 84. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence, and that's all from me for three whole weeks. My colleague Shashank Joshi will be hosting next week. The show's editors this week are Kim Gitelson and Chris Impey. Our senior producers are Duncan Barber, Sam Colbert and Sam Westren. Our producers are Stevie Hertz and William Warren and assistant producers Jason Hoskin and Abasoye Ocean Dairo, with extra production help this week from Emily Elias. They'll all see you back here on Monday.