by Vincenzo Petrone (*)
ROMA (ITALPRESS) – Peaceful Greenland is forcing Europeans and Canada to finally do what they should have done for a while. It is time to think of an Atlantic Alliance without the United States or at least not in the role of its absolute protagonist. President Trump almost accidentally asked himself today whether he was more interested in taking possession of Greenland or keeping NATO alive.
And he did it with a nonchalance that, with all respect, reminds a great Italian cabarettist, Giorgio Gaber when he claimed to be in doubt every morning, waking up, whether to found a multinational or to go to the sea. And he always chose to go to the sea. Apart from the involuntary humor that often proves, it is difficult to think that Trump will not choose NATO, and this is not because he believes or because he loves the company of Europeans and Canadians but because Congress would not allow him to do otherwise. Including the Republican Senators who begin to give signs of tiredness to a President who ignores them in all his foreign policy decisions and risks losing their majority in Congress in November.
So, today in Washington, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D.Vance will have to find with the Foreign Minister of Denmark and with the Prime Minister of Greenland an honorable way of leaving Trump to declare victory: Greenland will have more American military and more US and NATO bases that will protect it from China and Russia. And perhaps we can move to more serious things like Iran. The Greenland problem in this way will be defyed but it will have the merit of exalting without more hypocrisy, the great and imprehensible topicality of a political and strategic observation: the United States is no longer a reliable and available ally, to whose protective, nuclear and conventional umbrella, Europeans can entrust their security over the years to come. Years in which Putin’s Russia may disengage in some way from the swamp in which it has flown with the war in Ukraine and will be able to reconstitute its war potential at the gates of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The forecast of the Moscow State is to dispose within 5 years of 1,8 million active soldiers.
Trump’s Special Envoy also said it several times to Europeans, last in Paris last week: the United States is considered mediators between Europe, Ukraine included, on the one hand and Russia on the other. And those who have read the National Security Strategy published by the White House cannot be surprised that in Washington, the fate of the Atlantic Alliance is now considered marked. The dynamic core of the European countries which could first begin to discuss the next, on how to neatly and gradually take the place of America in NATO was established on 6 January, to adopt the splendid declaration of support for Greenland and Denmark that the Heads of State and Government of Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Poland and Great Britain have adopted jointly.
This appears as the core of a natural, credible deployment, which gradually takes over the leadership of NATO operations in Europe. Our President of the Council has done well to sign that Declaration with the 5 Partners.
It will now be in Italy to form a broad network of political support for the path that begins. And he will have to seek support throughout the constitutional framework to move from statements to facts, i.e. to the strengthening of the national defence instrument, which will be called to leading responsibilities in the renewed Atlantic Alliance. It will be a very high profile exercise, full of internal policy risks. But of an importance not less than the operation carried out by the greatest President of the Italian Council of our second post-war period, Alcide De Gasperi. President De Gasperi was able to sign the Atlantic Covenant in 1949 as a founding country, but to do so he had to challenge communists, socialists and many great Catholic leaders of his own Christian Democracy who wanted a neutral Italy between East and West. Today it has been forgotten that De Gasperi had to go to the audience by Pope Pius XII to convince the recalcitrant democrat leaders to support him.
(*) ambassador
– photo IPA Agency –
(ITALPRESS).
