RIO DE JANEIRO—At right-wing Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro’s kickoff rally in the city’s Copacabana neighborhood in August, most of his supporters were clad in their usual green and yellow—some wearing soccer jerseys—and waving Brazilian flags.

But a handful of attendees also raised the flags of other countries: the United States and Israel. The banners symbolized the direction that Bolsonaro promises to take Brazil’s foreign policy if he is elected next month: away from the hedging between the United States and its great-power rivals that has defined the current administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is running for reelection. Bolsonaro and Lula are neck and neck in the most recent polls.

The Bolsonaro political camp has spent years building close ties with U.S. President Donald Trump. Bolsonaro’s father, Jair Bolsonaro, emulated Trump’s brash style to win the Brazilian presidency in 2018; his brother Eduardo Bolsonaro has strategized with figures such as former Trump advisor Steve Bannon to boost far-right politics in Latin America. Eduardo has also urged Trump to take actions that could hurt Lula, such as sanctioning the Brazilian judges who convicted his father of plotting to overturn Lula’s 2022 election. Trump called the trial a “witch hunt” and cited it as a justification for hiking U.S. tariffs against many Brazilian goods to a whopping 50 percent last year.

Flávio Bolsonaro has promised to step up the U.S.-Brazil relationship if he wins the presidency. He has said he would join the Shield of the Americas, Trump’s militarized anti-gang initiative; vowed to immediately seek a free trade agreement with Washington; and suggested that U.S.-Brazil partnerships on rare earths could help the United States break free of China’s dominance in the sector. But Bolsonaro also faces constraints to wholly reorienting Brazil’s foreign policy.

While the Trump administration is urging Latin American allies to spurn ties with China, the country remains Brazil’s top trade partner. If elected, it’s likely that Bolsonaro would align with Trump on security matters while preserving major economic links with Beijing, foreign-policy experts said in interviews. Meanwhile, Brazil’s efforts to build financial and technological autonomy to shield itself from pressures from either country would likely shrink, as would its efforts to keep multilateralism and global climate cooperation alive.

The foreign-policy changes that Bolsonaro promises are remarkable in part because the topic is not a leading issue for many of his voters. Among a dozen supporters whom Foreign Policy interviewed at his Copacabana rally, none listed foreign policy as their top priority; Brazilians as a whole tell pollsters that their leading election issues are security and the economy.

What’s more, Brazilians’ opinion of the United States has worsened during the second Trump administration, according to multiple surveys. If Bolsonaro wins, it may not be because Brazilians prefer a pro-U.S. tilt, but due to dissatisfaction with Lula in other areas.

On security, it’s reasonable to assume that a Bolsonaro government would align itself with Trump, said Creomar de Souza, the founder of Brasília-based consultancy Dharma Political Risk and Strategy. Bolsonaro endorsed Trump’s move in May to label two Brazilian crime groups as terrorist organizations, which Lula opposed; the designation opens the door to potential U.S. sanctions and even military action against the groups.

While the United States has not yet taken such action, a potential Bolsonaro government might employ U.S. intelligence support for Brazilian military operations against the groups, said Fernanda Magnotta, a nonresident senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue’s Brazil program. In recent months, the Trump administration has given intelligence support for such operations in Mexico—and has gone as far as putting boots on the ground in Ecuador.

On China, however, Trump’s stated goal that “non-Hemispheric competitors” will not “own or control strategically vital assets” would hit constraints, even under a sympathetic Bolsonaro presidency. Jair Bolsonaro visited Taiwan and accused China of “buying Brazil” ahead of his 2018 election—but in office, that critical rhetoric faded away under the weight of the Brazil-China economic relationship. During his 2019-2022 administration, Brazil grew its trade relationship with China, disregarded U.S. pressure to completely cut Chinese telecom giant Huawei out of its 5G network, and remained active in the BRICS geopolitical club that it co-founded with Beijing.

The younger Bolsonaro’s written campaign platform strikes a pragmatic tone, pledging to negotiate with China alongside other countries where Brazil has interests at stake. While the campaign declined to give a standalone interview for this article, Bolsonaro’s vice presidential candidate, Alfredo Gaspar, responded to a Foreign Policy question about Brazil-China relations at the Copacabana rally by saying that “Brazil will always treat all the countries of the world with decency, with equality, and with an aim to strengthen relations. We will engage with anyone who wants transparent relations with Brazil and to strengthen mutual trade.”

Even so, Bolsonaro has said that he would limit areas of Brazil-China engagement that Trump sees as especially sensitive. In a July communiqué to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Bolsonaro endorsed blocking Brazil’s instant payment system PIX from “non-Western cross-border settlement arrangements”—just as Chinese payment company UnionPay International had been planning to link up with PIX so that Chinese visitors to Brazil could pay for anything from taxi rides to restaurant meals by scanning PIX QR codes.

In the same document, Bolsonaro criticized the Lula government’s moves toward “de-dollarization.” Under Lula, Brazilian and Chinese companies have increasingly settled business in their native currencies without converting them to dollars in between. Brazil has also announced plans to issue yuan-denominated sovereign bonds this year.

Supporters of boosting nondollar transactions point out that they can reduce conversion fees. And in today’s age of geoeconomic weaponry, they can also make business between Brazil and China less vulnerable to potential U.S. sanctions.

“Brazil really needs to create ways to have a monetary payment system that is more autonomous and less vulnerable to external pressures,” said Philip Yang, a former Brazilian diplomat and advisory board member at the Brazilian Center of International Relations. But he added that Brazil’s business community does not have a universal consensus on the matter, which means that progress on nondollar transactions could slow in a Bolsonaro government.

Beyond currency, Lula’s government has also sought to diversify which companies it hires for critical technology services such as cloud data storage, artificial intelligence computer power, and satellites. It’s announced plans to buy one Chinese and one American supercomputer. In addition to relying on a Brazilian satellite company, it has authorized Elon Musk’s Starlink and its Chinese rival SpaceSail to provide satellite services. And it has collaborated with partners in Spain and India on open-source chip design and age-verification technologies.

Brazilian tech and foreign-policy experts have generally praised such diversification. Working with multiple partners means not “giving any one of them the power to interrupt critical state capacities,” said Daniele Kleiner, the co-director of tech policy consultancy Alandar. Plus, she added, “the more you diversify your portfolio, the more companies [seeking government contracts] will adjust themselves to meet your needs.”

Esther Dweck, Brazil’s minister of management and innovation in public services, told Folha de S. Paulo in August that the Lula administration had already experienced some success on this front: After it convinced Huawei to allow Brazilian state companies to locally manage some of its technology, U.S. tech giants grew more open to doing the same.

Despite that progress, critical tech infrastructure is an area where Bolsonaro might comply with U.S. pressure to curb Chinese businesses activity, according to analysts. In a Bolsonaro government, “I would expect continued trade with China, but with less strategic density, less engagement in de-dollarization, and greater screening of investments in sensitive sectors,” said Magnotta of the Inter-American Dialogue.

Bolsonaro has argued that there is an untapped upside to greater deference to the United States on economic policy, saying that it can deliver Brazil relief from the pain of heavy U.S. tariffs. That strikes a contrast with Lula, who said that some concessions that Trump sought when announcing the levies—such as loosening Brazilian regulations on U.S. tech companies—would have violated Brazil’s sovereignty.

Bolsonaro has not yet announced whom he would name as foreign minister and has resisted questions about his foreign policy in media appearances. Seeking centrist voters in recent months, he has at times tried to characterize himself as more moderate than his father. If his foreign policy is indeed so, it would keep Brazil in long-standing partnerships such as the Mercosur trade bloc and BRICS, de Souza said.

But a more radical foreign policy is not out of the question—one that privileges figures such as Eduardo Bolsonaro, who for years has bashed the United Nations, criticized climate action, and worked to boost members of the global far right. A columnist at newspaper O Globo wrote on Sept. 13 that Eduardo has said privately that he will run the foreign ministry if his brother became president. Bolsonaro’s platform says that Brazil will “help the world carry out the energy transition,” but in an August television interview, he cast doubt on whether humans were responsible for climate change.

Whether Bolsonaro’s foreign policy is more moderate or more radical, one major difference with Lula appears clear. “The Lula government is still placing its bets like there’s a multilateral solution for the moment we’re living through,” de Souza said. He added that Lula believes that Brazil can help shape multilateralism while also enacting tech and economic policies that “create the best possible margin for maneuver in order to be a middle power.”

Bolsonaro, on the other hand, assumes that “middle powers will be engulfed by the gravitational pull” of either the United States or China, in de Souza’s words, and that Brazil understands itself as part of the Western Hemisphere. His worldview is similar to the Argentine concept of “peripheral realism” coined in the 1990s, de Souza added—the idea that weak countries would be better off if they don’t try to build independent positions from great powers.

Under that line of thinking, said de Souza, while Bolsonaro might choose to cooperate with the United States on some matters and China on others, when it comes to Brazil itself, “it doesn’t make sense to have big, autonomous dreams.”