Protecting ourselves to break the siege. Staying allies with Trump, without being dependent. Minister Crosetto speaks

Evoked threats, unexpected hopes, latent short circuits, strategies that collapse, alliances that come apart, balances that break, horizons that open.

Minister Guido Crosetto, a few days ago, held a lecture on a delicate theme: what are the new boundaries of the culture of defense and what difference there is between trying to protect a country and attempting to fuel a warlike spirit. Crosetto accepted to dialogue at length with Il Foglio on this theme and our conversation with the minister starts from here to then arrive at some themes that concern the present of Italy and the future of the government. Crosetto said that the culture of defense is not culture of war. We therefore ask the minister: are we sure that Italians, in this historical phase, truly grasp the difference?

“No, they do not grasp it fully, and it is a problem because it makes it difficult to give the answers that the historical period requires. For too many years we have told defense as if it were a technical parenthesis, an uncomfortable chapter of the budget, a useless waste, a subject to leave to specialists. But defense is another thing: it is protection. Protection of the territory, of the institutions, of the critical infrastructures, of energy, of the industrial supply chains, of data, even of the quality of public debate. Today war no longer begins when you see the tank cross a border. It begins much earlier: when you depend on others for raw materials, when you do not control the decisive technologies, when your public opinion becomes permeable to propaganda, when you convince yourself that security is a vulgar, secondary theme, almost embarrassing. The culture of defense is not the praise of force. It is the awareness of vulnerability.”

“I would call it siege. But a siege very different from those that we have studied in the history books. To the east there is Russia, which continues to remind Europe that military power is not a relic of the twentieth century. To the southeast there is Iran which, adding together the Middle Eastern events to the total African instability, shows how the enlarged Mediterranean is the true frontier of our security. To the west, today, there is a novelty, there is American uncertainty, which does not mean anti-Americanism but acknowledgment of a reality: when also the strongest ally becomes unpredictable, the alliance must become more adult. And then there are the invisible sieges: the hybrid war, disinformation, cyber attacks, economic pressure, the capacity to orient fears and perceptions. We are used to thinking of threats as something that arrives from outside. Instead today the threat enters also from inside, exploiting our slowness, our divisions, our moral tiredness.”

“For me no, and it should not be so for any serious European. The biggest error that we can make is to geographize the danger, as if what happens in Kyiv concerned only Kyiv, what happens in Warsaw concerned only Warsaw, what happens in the Baltics concerned only the Baltics. Russia is not a threat because it is close to someone. It is a threat because it has brought back to the center of Europe the idea that borders can be changed with force, that the sovereignty of others can be violated in the name of a historical mission, that industrial production can be bent in a stable way to war. This changes everything. It changes our agenda, our way of making deterrence, the relationship between spending, industry, intelligence, technology. And it also changes the collective psychology: because it forces Europe to exit from the fiction according to which peace is a natural, automatic, self-sufficient good.”

“Exactly. One of the great European self-deceptions is to believe that some crises are ‘regional’. Hormuz is not regional. It is a vein of the global economic metabolism. When there something stops, the effect arrives in the bills, in the factories, in logistics, in prices, in the daily life of families. This is why I say that one cannot reason on that Strait as if it were a matter of navy and that is it. Of course, there is a theme of maritime security. But before that there is a political theme: no European country, alone, can think of guaranteeing the freedom of that passage or of managing the consequences of a prolonged closure of it. A multilateral framework is needed, a robust legitimation, a common European line, and possibly a capacity of initiative that is not improvised when the crisis has already exploded. The point is not to show the muscles. The point is to avoid that the world enters into a spiral in which every energy junction becomes a geopolitical blackmail.”

“It is a paradox, but paradoxes must be looked in the face. No one puts in discussion what America has represented for European freedom. Our democracy, our security, our same postwar history would be incomprehensible without the United States. But precisely for this we must be frank: there exist moments in which some problems are posed also by allied and friendly countries. And in those moments the answer cannot be neither the hysterical rupture nor the infantile subordination. It must be maturity. It means keeping firm the strategic and inseparable alliances, but also remembering that rules, procedures, sovereignties, European interests exist. The autonomous strengthening of Europe is not an anti-American spite: it is the only serious way to remain allies without being dependent. If Europe does not grow in responsibility, every oscillation of Washington will become for us an existential crisis.”

“I mean that we continue to discuss security with categories too old. We think that democracy is defended only in the ballot boxes or in the courts. Certainly, also there. But today it is defended also in the networks, in the submarine cables, in the satellites, in the servers, in the payment systems, in the platforms, in the informational ecosystem. Democracies are strong, but they are also more exposed, because they are open. And openness, if it is not accompanied by awareness, becomes a fragility that can be exploited. The influence campaigns do not serve to convince us to all become pro-Russian, pro-Iranian or pro-Chinese. They serve to something simpler and more effective: to make us doubt ourselves, to make us perceive defense as suspicious, the West as guilty in itself, firmness as fanaticism, lucidity as escalation. This is the hybrid war: to move the psychological balance of democratic societies.”

“I think that a certain caricature of pacifism has produced this effect. The culture of peace is a noble thing that must be preserved and guarded. But when peace is told as the simple opposite of preparation, then it becomes a dangerous fairy tale. Peace is protected. It is not inherited. It does not preserve itself by itself. It is not enough to desire it. And above all it is not defended by humiliating the very idea of defense. In these years we have often equated every military investment to a bellicist temptation, every discourse on deterrence to a form of aggressiveness, every appeal to readiness to a concession to paranoia. It has been a pedagogical error as well as a political one. Because it has disaccustomed citizens, and even part of the ruling classes, to think of security as a common good. We must redo an enormous cultural work: in school, in university, in the media, in the places where civic sense is formed. To prepare does not mean to evoke conflict. It means to reduce the probability of suffering it.”

“Exactly. To spend is necessary, but it is not enough. If the theme is reduced to a percentage of GDP, we have already lost half of the battle. Because the problem is not only how much you spend. It is how you spend, for what you spend, how quickly you transform that spending into effective capacities. Air defense, cyber defense, space capabilities, protection of infrastructures, integrated systems, munitions, dual-use technology, logistic resilience are needed. But also a public machine that decides in times compatible with reality is needed. Democracies cannot continue to react with administrative and bureaucratic calendars that are eternal to threats that change every week. Procedural slowness today is a strategic vulnerability. Bureaucracy, in certain cases, is not neutrality: it is organized impotence.”

“Because today sovereignty is measured also there. Not in declarations, but in the capacity to produce. If you are not able to build quickly what you need to defend yourself, if you depend entirely on others for essential components, if you do not govern critical technologies, your autonomy is rhetoric. It applies to missiles, drones, air defense systems, satellites, semiconductors, shipbuilding, software, critical raw materials. And it applies also to energy. For this I say that industry must do more. Not in a perspective of permanent war economy, but in a perspective of national and European responsibility. One must increase production capacity, shorten times, reward innovation, integrate the public and private sector, build value chains less exposed to blackmail. Freedom has a cost. But also dependence has a cost. Only that the second arrives when it is too late.”

“China is the great factor to govern with lucidity, without slogans. It is not only a commercial competitor. It is more and more often the economic, technological and diplomatic glue of political systems that challenge the West. Not necessarily because it shares every move of Moscow or Tehran, but because it occupies the space that opens when the West is divided, slow or dependent. The Chinese presence in financial, technological, industrial chains, in Africa, in the Middle East, in strategic infrastructures, is not neutral. It is power. And when you accumulate dependencies towards a power, that power enters into your margin of sovereignty. For this it is not enough to say ‘we are worried’. One must build alternatives.”

“It means to stop reasoning only with the formulas of the past. Traditional alliances remain indispensable, but alone they are not enough. It means to stop reasoning only with the formulas of the past. Traditional alliances remain indispensable, but alone they are not enough. Today concentric circles of responsibility are needed among countries that share a diagnosis of the risk and a will to react. Not only ‘the willing’, but countries that have understood that the current balances are insufficient with respect to the speed of the threats. I think of Europe, certainly. I think of NATO. But I also think of a new architecture in which the UK, Norway, the Balkan countries, Switzerland, Turkey and also Ukraine are already inside the substantial perimeter of European security, even before all the formal paths of accession are completed and also independently from accession. We cannot ask any nation that wants it, even less a country that has been fighting for years for its own freedom and, as a reflection, also for ours, to remain in a geopolitical waiting room. Those who defend democracies must be put in the condition to do so inside a real network, not inside an abstract solidarity.”

“The two things by now coincide. The military risk grows when cultural awareness collapses. If a nation no longer feels the value of its own security, if it considers its own strategic industry irrelevant, if it imagines that freedom and well-being are permanent givens, then it becomes more vulnerable also on the operational level. Defense is before, during and after. Before, in deterrence, in preparation, in formation, in culture. During, in the capacity of multidomain response to crises. After, in stabilization, in reconstruction, in the continuity of institutions. For this I continue to say that defense does not belong only to the Armed Forces. It concerns the university, business, public administration, school, the media, politics. It is a national matter. A mature democracy does not delegate its own security to a specialist unit. It assumes responsibility for it.”

“That preparing oneself does not mean surrendering to war, but preventing that others decide for us. That the culture of defense does not restrict freedom: it protects it. That a nation that understands itself, that knows its own fragilities, that invests in its own capacities, that does not exchange realism for cynicism and prudence for fear, is a freer nation. And also more peaceful. Because true peace is not the absence of unpleasant words. It is the presence of sufficient conditions to discourage those who think that force, blackmail or propaganda can bend a democracy. Defense, ultimately, is this: making a country capable of remaining itself while the world around changes violently.”

“Because there are moments in which politics must remember to be a serious thing. And this is one of those moments. We can discuss everything: the balances inside the majority, the wounds left by a referendum, the ambitions of parties, the electoral conveniences, the background stories that fascinate the palaces. But outside the palaces, today, there is a world that is catching fire. And when you have a war that alters energy balances, puts pressure on logistic chains, exposes markets, obliges to continuous decisions on the diplomatic, military and industrial level, the theme cannot be the tactical destiny of this or that leader. The theme is the holding of the country. I say it in a very simple way: as long as there is this war, there exists for a responsible ruling class no option different from going forward. Head down, sense of the State, responsibility. All the rest comes after. Not because politics must stop being politics, but because there is a hierarchy of priorities. And the first priority, today, is not to transmit to Italy and to its allies the idea of a distracted, nervous country, folded onto its own internal games while around the relations of global power are being redefined.

Those who, in a phase like this, think that the answer can be to open a crisis, to measure balances of power, to chase the temptation of the vote or of internal settling of accounts, in my opinion make a double error. Political, because they underestimate the gravity of the context. And moral, because they confuse legitimate democratic competition with disinterest for the general good. Elections are never a taboo, in democracy. But they are not even a conditioned reflex to activate every time there is a difficulty. There is a time for verifications, and there is a time to withstand the impact. This is the time to withstand the impact. When the war will end, when the international framework will be less exposed to unpredictability, when we will be able to return to reasoning without having every day one more strategic variable to manage, then all the necessary evaluations will be made. One will discuss politics, structures, programs, perspectives. But to do it today, with this scenario, would mean sending a devastating message: that Italy, at the moment in which it should show itself more solid, chooses to show itself more fragile. And I instead think that today the duty of the government is exactly the opposite: to give continuity, to give seriousness, to give the concrete sensation that at the helm there is someone who understands the difference between the noise of politics and the weight of history.”

“Stability by itself is never enough. No one can tell Italians the fairy tale according to which it is enough to have a government standing to automatically resolve the problems of the economy. It does not work like that. There are external factors that no government controls: wars, the price of energy, the volatility of markets, the slowdown of trade, the return of imported inflation, the pressure on supply chains. It would be childish to deny it. But it would be equally irresponsible to deny the other half of the truth: in a phase like this, having a responsible government, recognizable, capable of giving stability, confidence and credibility is not a sufficient ingredient, but it is a necessary ingredient.

Necessary because, when uncertainty grows around, the first thing that a country must avoid is to add a domestic one. If you have an international framework already compromised, you cannot add also the suspicion that Italy does not know where it goes, that it changes line every two weeks, that it does not have a clear voice toward markets, toward Europe, toward businesses, toward citizens. Credibility is not an abstract word: it is the way in which a State manages to be taken seriously when it defends its interests, when it negotiates in Europe, when it asks for flexibility, when it must protect families and businesses from the long wave of a geopolitical crisis.

Today the economic situation is not simple and it would be an error to sweeten it. The war raises again the energy risk, puts pressure again on costs, can erode consumption and investments, obliges everyone to a greater prudence. In a context like this, however, the stability of the government becomes a form of immaterial infrastructure. It does not create growth by itself, but it avoids that distrust becomes an additional tax. It does not substitute reforms, but it at least makes them possible. It does not cancel external shocks, but it allows to face them with a clear decision chain and with credible interlocutors.

This is valid for businesses, which need to understand if the regulatory framework will hold. It is valid for savers, who observe the cost of money, inflation, energy, and ask at least one thing: to know that someone governs. It is valid for international partners, who in moments like these distinguish quickly the countries that have a line from the countries that have only a sum of polemics. And it is valid also for citizens more simply: because in phases of collective fear stability is not only a technical fact, it is a civil message.

Then, of course, choices are needed. Industrial policy, energy, budget seriousness, capacity to accelerate where one can accelerate, protection of strategic supply chains, support to exposed sectors, administrative speed are needed. But all this you build only if first you have defended the framework. And the framework, today, is called reliability. This is why I insist on this point: stability is not the finish line. It is the prerequisite. It is not enough to make Italy grow, but without stability Italy risks first of all to shrink, to become afraid, to lose confidence in itself. And in a season in which wars are fought also on markets, on perception, on the psychological resistance of nations, losing confidence would be the most serious damage.”