by Vincenzo Petrone (*)
ROMA (ITALPRESS) – Dear Bettino… Dear Donald. Sincerely yours, Giorgia Meloni. The times are certainly very different from that far October of 1985 in Sigonella, Sicily, when two allied countries almost shot each other. And yet analogies appear noticeable even to the naked eye The conjuncture of American domestic politics is profoundly different since then and Donald Trump cannot afford to imitate Ronald Reagan because he does not have his charm, or if he had dispersed it, towards Western leaders. But above all because it does not have the popularity of the “Gipper” among voters. We are in the midst of a very dangerous Atlantic crisis triggered on Greenland and to understand how Italy can help get out of it, we must overcome self-commiseration for the time that was and above all the instrumental polemic of the straight back principle. According to some statements, the Italian government should have it in these hours of difficult relationship with America but it does not. The posture alters, straightness is more natural to assume if you are opposed. On the same day and without getting the dizziness to come, in this case you have the privilege of being able to claim dignity and autonomy towards America, protagonism in Europe, Strong and protective Armed Forces, more generous social expenditure and of course, more flexible and more consistent pensions. All without paying more taxes.
For this crisis, however, it takes a different relationship between government and opposition. We need a different step, and there are the conditions. Italy in these days is faced with important choices and in order not to be dragged towards outcomes that do not agree with them, must attempt to assume the own responsibilities of a great country or nation, if you prefer. Government and opposition must leave the horizon of pre-election competition, because Italian politics can fly higher as it has already done in the past. At the time of Sigonella for example, both the political parties of government and the Italian Communist Party from opposition, exactly that they did. And yet, we were in the middle of the Cold War. The president of the Bettino Craxi Council sent the Avieri and the Carabinieri armed to surround the Americans of the Delta Force on the Sigonella track because he did not accept in a NATO base, a violation of Italian sovereignty. And a communist leader who would then come to the Quirinale, Giorgio Napolitano, publicly recognized on behalf of his party, that the Central Left Government was writing an important foreign policy page: “More assertive”, he called it. In these hours, President Trump is putting at existential risk the Atlantic Alliance with the threat of retaliation duties against Europeans who sent soldiers to Greenland. And this morning he made it worse by sending a very curious letter to the Prime Minister of Norway, guilty of not getting him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Perhaps more than all the other great European countries, our Italians are the least able to afford, for several years, to lose military and political coverage of NATO. The duty of realism requires us to recognize that we do not have the financial means or a political consensus sufficiently widespread and solid in the common people and in Parliament, for a sub-implementation of the process of rearmament, sisgnore, rearmament. With the other NATO countries and Europe, we have already assumed the commitment to achieve it but it will take years, and not a few. In Europe, however, they are returning security tensions with Russia. And only under NATO’s protective umbrella, we Italians can have time to recover the lost time in rebuilding our defence system. And to the same start the inevitable processes of military cooperation and integration in Europe and with Britain. In this sense of national interest, the President of the Council from Seoul did well to offer the President of the United States an intelligent reading of the European presence in Greenland as an effort of the NATO European pillar for the security of the Arctic. And to reiterate, this time opens verbis that Italy stands in Europe and with Europeans threatened with retaliation and Greenland is not appropriate. Now, and first of all in the national interest, it is necessary that President Meloni take the initiative and insist on a summit meeting between the four major European countries and the United States to defuse the crisis and start a NATO planning process for security in the Arctic and Greenland.
Trump can hardly escape because he cannot ignore that his claims on Greenland do not find consensus either in Congress or among Americans. At the same time, the tiny European contingent in Greenland tells him that Europeans will not abandon the defence of a piece of the territory of Europe. The strategic justification in terms of security, Trump’s claim to acquire Greenland is clearer with the statement of these days that that control would be indispensable for the “Golden Dome” that is the project launched by Trump to create a kind of protective dome over the American territory against a possible attack from China, North Korea or Russia with linear trajectory missiles such as Cruises or with ball trajectory vectors. President Trump has not worked out any further, but what he has already said concerns NATO very much, for the implications of other countries of the Alliance, of this possible American technological adventure. Men never can these fallouts escape if, as in the case of the author of these lines, the story of the NATO installation of the Midway Missiles in Europe was professionally experienced between December 1979 and 1986. The strategy underlying the disproportionate political decision that in Italy led to the willingness to install the Missili Cruises in Comiso, was not to allow a distinction, the “decoupling”, between the security of the United States and that of Europe in the hypothesis of a Soviet missile attack. This is because the entire NATO joint defence strategy would have been fragmented and therefore fatally compromised. It was the logic of President Reagan when he launched the “Strategic Defence Initiative” in 1983. In Italy the newspapers called them “star wars. The SDI had to give NATO a protective dome against Soviet missiles. But protective of all NATO, not only the United States. And President Reagan offered the European countries to participate in the gigantic effort to develop the technologies necessary to create a network of satellites, sensors and system of interception of carriers of a possible attack.
Italy negotiated among the first and signed the agreement for participation in SDI in September 1986. The Secretary General of the Farnesina and his collaborators, the undersigned among them, negotiated for months with the Pentagon to arrive at the signature, always with full support from the President of the Bettino Craxi Council and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Giulio Andreotti. It is not called Cold War if you prefer it, but unfortunately Italy is expected many years in Europe of similar tension. Italy and its Government have all the titles to take the initiative to propose to the United States and Europeans to immediately start an internal process to NATO, for the safety of Greenland and Arctic and for a new allied defence architecture that allows not to crush the pivotal concept of the Atlantic Alliance and Article 5 of the Treaty, that of the indivisible common defence. This morning, in reading President Trump’s statements he would be tempted to be pessimistic and instead not, this is the right time to go to see American papers and understand if a NATO relaunch is possible. And Italy can promote a summit confrontation. In short, we try again with a “Dear Donald” and see if in response comes a “Dear Giorgia”. The interests at stake are not different from those of 40 years ago and both Russia and now unfortunately China are not empathic, we say so, neither with Europe nor with America. In the American Congress if you voted tomorrow, this opinion would have 90 percent of the consensus. In public opinion, some less. In Italy, in one way or another, the opposition could not at least support silently, an initiative like our Government. Simply because it is in the interest of the country, or the nation.
(*) ambassador a. r.
(ITALPRESS).
