From an academic point of view, Brazil's current foreign policy is quite relevant for International Relations theory. For example, it'll be a useful case study to test whether soft power matters. Here we have a country whose gov quickly undermined its own soft power [thread]

According to Joe Nye, who created the term, soft power involves shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction, rather than coercion. While conceptually vague&often misunderstood, there was a relatively broad consensus that Brazil possessed significant soft power

A 2013 study by a leading business school, INSEAD, noted that "Brazil is an attractive country in the traditional soft power sense. It has an appealing popular culture and a multicultural society whose people interact well with others." https://www.oliverstuenkel.com/2016/09/20/brics-possess-power/

While soft power is an inherently relational concept (e.g. China may be attractive from an African perspective but not from a US perspective), there is a broad perception that the Bolsonaro government is dramatically reducing Brazil's attractiveness in the eyes of the world.

In order to assess to what extent soft power matters, we could thus compare Brazil's influence abroad in 2013-2018 with that in 2019-2020. (We should not include the time before 2013 because Brazil's economy doing very well at the time, which would complicate the analysis.)

It'll take years for scholars to produce more sophisticated academic analyses of Bolsonaro's foreign policy (we still lack access to documents &can't conduct oral history interviews w decision makers), but radical changes like this always provide rich material to test IR theories