The world is changing at a speed never experienced before. But it changes differently depending on where you are. Looking at the world from Italy implies the gaze of a group that is still relatively rich, but in evident decline. Having lived for eighty years in the best context ever experienced by the Bel Paese - peace, security, widespread well-being, an enviable degree of freedom and democracy, with moderate inequalities - the impact of the geopolitical revolution underway on a global scale is muted. However, we fear that it is illusory to imagine that we are endowed with such a positional income that we can consider ourselves immune from the crises looming around us.
The geopolitical condition of Italy today must be seen against the backdrop of a decisive historical fact: we are a nation that catastrophically lost the Second World War. This parameter is still alive in the system of international relations. Our pedagogy, starting from basic school, has instead inculcated in the three generations that followed the disaster of the fascist war the idea that thanks to the Resistance we have redeemed ourselves and obtained an entry visa into the privileged family of the winners. Yet even today the United Nations Charter contains the "enemy clauses" that brand Italy, Germany and Japan with the stigma of losing aggressors. As such, they can be attacked without Security Council authorization. So far the form, which can sometimes become substance – we hope and believe not. The informal but effective substance tells us that in a short space of years the geopolitical context in which we were able to enjoy, in every respect, the advantage of having lost the war on the "right" side, the American one, has entered into crisis. The structural identity crisis that is affecting the United States, regardless of Trump or whoever governs it, and the festival of particularisms and nationalisms underway in Europe threaten the positive factors of security and growth to which we are accustomed.
From a strategic and strictly military point of view we are no longer guaranteed by the American umbrella in the guise of NATO. The Italian bases contracted to the Americans and Atlantics are still there, from Friuli to Sicily. But if previously one could, with a certain optimism, consider it an "umbrella", the Israeli-American attack on Iran and the large-scale response by Tehran, which ended up hitting several Stars and Stripes bases in the Arabian Peninsula, teach us the new paradigm: today hosting installations for US use on one's own territory means becoming potential targets of America's enemies. We risk ending up at war with a power that is not angry with Italy but with America and which therefore strikes the enemy wherever it establishes itself, therefore also here.
The other country to which we were closely linked was Germany, as leader in the Eurozone. With which we had a notable degree of industrial interdependence, especially in mechanics, especially when relating to the automotive sector. The war in Ukraine and the consequent renunciation of Russian gas, together with the drying up of the Chinese market, have inflicted a very serious blow on the German system and prestige, in addition to the growth of the nationalist AfD party. It remains that Berlin is the guarantor of our very heavy public debt, exceeding 3,200 billion euros. Growing.
Result: we are less safe, less rich and in constant demographic decline, moreover poorly distributed - the South is in rapid decline, the North is much more contained - while the median age of Italians is close to half a century. Since in recent months there has often been talk of preparing for war because Russia would like to attack us, it would be interesting to know with what forces we should stop it.
But the medium-long term geopolitical question concerns the Mediterranean, or rather the Middle Ocean as Limes has renamed it, as a maritime area that surrounds us and connects, via canals and straits of the Red Sea and via Gibraltar, to the World Ocean. For a country that has to import the raw materials it almost lacks and which dedicates a third of its production volume to export goods, blockades or restrictions on passage between Suez and Bab al-Mandab, as well as Hormuz, are a fatal threat.
