Written by Radio Newspaper
Edited by Ferruccio Bovio
It is good that everyone in Europe realizes that the strategic balance that, for eighty years, the American military commitment had guaranteed in our Old Continent, is destined to be – hopefully not too quickly and traumatic – archived
Let’s be clear, not that post-war US foreign policy was inspired by a particular outburst of altruism towards us, since it was certainly directed by many other political-economic security interests. Those which, for example, aimed to contain the threat then posed by the presence, on the global scene, of the great adversary of those decades: that is, the Soviet Union. A leading role which, however, today the Russian bear has largely succumbed to the Chinese dragon, thus inducing the latest Washington administrations to concentrate their forces essentially on the Pacific area. This was a choice which – as was inevitable – ended up having negative repercussions on the reliability of NATO which, in Europe, we had comfortably become accustomed to considering as the main element of deterrence against the neo-imperial dreams of renewed Russian expansionism.
And considering that the European countries – at least for the moment – do not yet seem capable of setting up an effective common defence, it can be deduced that it will therefore be necessary to try to ensure that NATO itself – although with a reduced American participation compared to that of the past – is nevertheless able to adapt to the new situation, while still maintaining a certain military credibility.
Therefore, our future will depend – especially in the immediate years to come – precisely on the ability that Europe will have in maintaining sufficiently strong ties with the United States, regardless of who – Trump or non-Trump – may or may not occupy the Oval Office of the White House. This is to say that, in our opinion, thinking today of a Europe in total autonomy from the USA truly represents a very dangerous illusion.
The European Union, for a long time, was guilty of lulling itself into the idea (or, perhaps, even into the presumption) that, in order to count for something, it was enough to enunciate its sacrosanct values of individual and collective freedom or respect for international law, while ignoring the dramatic upheavals which, in the meantime, were instead profoundly modifying the global context. A context in which, however, those same values – if not adequately supported even at a military level – seem, unfortunately, destined to take on the same authority that words have when they are lost in the wind.
