By Vincenzo Petrone (*)
ROMA (ITALPRESS) – Greenland is a great opportunity. The Defence Minister Guido Crosetto said yesterday aloud if sending a small military contingent to Greenland by France, Germany and Britain was the beginning of a joke. In threatening new duties as a retaliation against France, Germany and the United Kingdom, Trump instead gave the impression opposed to that of Crosetto and that is to take this European decision very seriously.
And the American President is right to take seriously the arrival to Nuuk of that fifty European soldiers. The great countries of the Old Continent with that sending of soldiers for symbolic time, responded concretely to his arrogant claim to annex Greenland, “one way or the other”. Those soldiers tell him that Greenland is part of Europe and will be defended by Europeans if threatened.
If the TACO instinct (Trump Always Chickens Out, Trump always changes his mind) will prevail or not at the White House, it is not possible to say. Probably. At least this suggests the history of the Atlantic Alliance, the international security context and the statements of 3 Republican Senators who in two days publicly contradicted Trump on Greenland.
But they also believe Marco Rubio’s attempts, the prudent Secretary of State, to find exit ramps from the strategic tunnel in which Trump risks entering the entire US foreign policy order if he comes to mind making a military strike in Greenland. In this story, we Italians can and perhaps we have something to say, as it has always happened in the history of the Atlantic Alliance.
The President of the Italian Council this morning from Korea, with great clarity, has publicly offered Trump a solution and a key to reading the situation, not without having in openness declared to clear letters that Italy considers “an error the forecast of commercial sanctions to the detriment of the European countries that have sent troops to Greenland”. The interpretation of this sending that Meloni suggested is instead that Europeans “share American attention to Greenland and Arctic and Washington’s fear that they may be the subject of “hostile activity”. Finally, always from Korea, the President insisted on the “NATO role” in this matter, while he said that there was a “empty interpretation of the meaning of the presence of European troops in Greenland”.
Clearly: Europeans are in Greenland to signal Europe’s determination to counter the security risk from Russia and China. We must recognize that with these statements, Italy at the same time is proposing a way out of the internal crisis to NATO and a way to transform the crisis into an opportunity.
Italy could and should in the coming days, propose to the leaders of France, Germany and Great Britain and the President of the United States, to meet confidentially in Europe or in Washington to start a concrete discussion among great NATO allies. The objective would be to define together three aspects: the nature of the Russian and Chinese threat in Greenland and the routes of the Arctic Sea, the appropriate response of NATO to this threat and the “burden sharing”, the distribution of financial and operational charges between the allies.
In the context of NATO it will not be difficult to find the formulas that guarantee the United States the security and protection measures that President Trump considers indispensable, including forms of extraterritoriality of some American bases. Italy can play a leading role first of all because it is a credible ally, never having, in 80 years of NATO history, made it lacking its support for all the operations that the Alliance has carried out. In the case of the crisis with the Soviet Union for intermediate missiles between the end of the 70s and the first half of the 80s, Italy was the needle of the scale, we were able to make possible the deployment of medium-range missiles in Europe.
Italian diplomats and military had a prominent place in the High Level Group, which defined the terms of the deployment of new weapons. There is no doubt that this curious transatlantic divergence on Greenland can turn into an extraordinary European and American opportunity to respond effectively to a real security need created by Russian and Chinese activities in the Arctic.
But at the same time it can serve to attribute Europe to NATO, a role and cohesion that has never had so far. An Italian proposal of this tenor would also cause an important political clarification of the fundamental, no longer deferable, between the United States and European countries on a vital point: does Trump’s America believe or not in NATO or want to use this crisis to dissolve the Alliance? It is also important for Italy to understand it, before the roads divide and Europeans are forced to organize otherwise cooperation between them for the security of our continent.
And we Italians in this case would not have much choice, regardless of the sympathy and the estimate that the current tenant of the White House proves to have on the personal level for our President of the Council. Estimate and sympathy that can now be put at the service of the highest European interest. If we’re still in time.
(*) ambassador a. r.
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(ITALPRESS).
