PM Meloni’s comment regarding the April 17, 2025 meeting is one of the usual ones: “With Trump fair and constructive confrontation.” On social media, now an accredited channel of political communication, Meloni herself added what we might call the slogan that emerged from this confrontation: “Working together to build a stronger West.” A laconic aphorism, if not actually a watchword, a mantra, with which she wanted to offer a programmatic and consumptive balance sheet of this meeting, which she called “A fair and constructive confrontation on strategic issues : from security to defense, from the fight against illegal immigration to trade relations” during which she took the opportunity to invite Trump to Rome, an invitation she was pleased to report was readily welcomed by the astute U.S. leader as this, in her words, “Will be another opportunity to strengthen the dialogue between our nations.”
Visibly pleased, with good reason, to have completed her own leap from the Biden bandwagon to the Trump bandwagon without incurring dangerous and embarrassing blatant posturing, she could not rightly refrain from declaring that in light of the facts, as she read them, “Italy is increasingly a protagonist in a rapidly changing international scenario. And today, thanks in part to the work done in recent years, our point of view is being heard and respected” so that “the bond between Italy and the United States remains solid, vital and decisive in facing together the great global challenges.”
Complementing Meloni’s meeting with Trump in Washington, here is that on April 18 U.S. Vice President Vance went to Rome for a tour of the capital where he in turn was able to meet with the PM at Palazzo Chigi to continue the dialogue on tariffs, and more, with a view to a possible meeting with the EU leadership: an eventuality that Trump has said he intends to consider and put on the agenda when he plans his visit to Italy, to really try to close that deal on duties that Meloni and himself have said they are convinced will be done “100 percent.”
A conviction that rests on solid foundations given that, according to what emerged and was reported in an ANSA statement on April 17, Italian companies, as declared by the Italian PM to the American President in the Oval Office, will invest EUR 10 BILLION in the United States (equivalent to USD 11.374 BILLION) and Italy will have to increase energy imports (LNG), in addition to developing nuclear power: data these that in Meloni’s own words demonstrate that “the respective economies are interconnected” (an observation that is trivial to say the least when made by one who, by virtue of his role, should have if nothing else an awareness of the meaning of the word ‘globalization’) although it is to be understood to whose advantage, given that these statements, in light of the facts, sound more like a justification for his unconditional surrender to the Tycoon’s wishes.
If we add to this, then, that Meloni herself has pledged to raise military spending to 2 percent of GDP as requested by NATO, read by the U.S., giving way to the increase of a financial commitment (in 2019 it was 1.22 percent of GDP) that amounts to a +10 BILLION EUR per year, a substantial share of which will be for obvious reasons destined to increase arms imports from overseas, it comes to say that Trump’s lavish praise of her ultimately rests on a nullity that the influential Bloomberg news outlet summed up with the exhaustive headline of a piece of its own edited by Donato Paolo Mancini and Kate Sullivan, which verbatim reads “Meloni earns Trump’s praise but walks away with little substance ” since little use was made of the one that, rightly, the ruthless Mancini and Sullivan described, unflatteringly for a PM, as “Giorgia Meloni’s charm offensive at the White House.”
In the end for most of Thursday’s press conference, which it seems many commentators especially Italians apparently did not listen to or did so with … ‘little’ attention, Meloni kept a decidedly low profile intervening mostly to praise the American President, i.e., to rehash her political speeches, such as her support for his fight against woke and the “ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion” earning a paid ban “Everyone loves and respects her, and I can’t say the same about many people (ed. clear reference to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy)” adding a “I would say he has taken Europe by storm” that served as prologue to his response to the question of whether he thought Italy could be the U.S.’s “best” ally in Europe: “Only if the prime minister remains the prime minister can he be our best ally. He is doing a great job. He is a great person and he is doing a great job and our relations are very good” .
On the other hand, anyone would have been astonished otherwise, nothing being able to be different from what was seen going on in Washington where PM Meloni, one of the many bipartisan transformers who have trod the scenes of Italian foreign policy who, in order to stay afloat (because that was all it was about since diplomacy is something else), offered a spectacle that was certainly unseemly quantum albeit to her credit, as well as those who have preceded it gradually in past years, one cannot overlook Italy’s null weight on the world chessboard and its exceedingly limited sovereignty resulting from a humiliating military defeat suffered as a result of its participation in WWII closed by signing an unconditional surrender of which, by dint of rhetoric about April 25, no one is talking about because almost no one knows the text.
Defeat and relative surrender that well reminds us of the approximately 120 U.S. military bases, some of which are integrated into NATO bases, others characterized by the presence of nuclear weapons, all of which are not under Italian sovereignty and therefore make Italy a country with limited sovereignty, to say nothing, in foreign policy: something that has come to the fore now and not in the past only in that never before had it happened that in the short span of four years U.S. foreign policy changed so rapidly as to make it impossible for whoever sat in Palazzo Chigi to adapt readily to it without having the material time to change their stated certainties, their stated principles and their stated unwavering values without giving too much away, as has now happened in the media slaughterhouse in Washington: that Oval Office where just a few weeks ago the Ukrainian president gave, all things considered, better media proof of himself, despite being thrown out the door.
That is, of course, assuming that everything that took place between Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy was nothing more than a sham, that is, something consistent with what Friedrich Merz speculated and declared after his election victory last Feb. 23, when he called the Ukrainian president’s famous Black Friday altercation in the Oval Office a “prepared escalation.” A suspicion, this one, legitimately expressed in early April during a press conference in Hamburg stating that from his point of view it would not be a spontaneous reaction to Zelensky’s interventions, but an artfully mounted dispute.”
A statement, this, which Merz had followed up with his own declaration of intent expressed in the following words, “We must now show that we are able to act independently in Europe.” In other words, the CDU leader, had expressed the view that the incident, broadcast live, and “marked by brutality” had stemmed from “the desire to humiliate, with the aim of making Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy bend through threats, so that he would yield to the demands of his aggressors.”
A legitimate reading, that of Merz’s that hinted, albeit in a sibylline way, at an altogether special concern for the Ukrainian president, moreover confirmed by the one concerning the need for Europe to finally do its part that so many on April 14 will have related to the statement that not a little outraged the Kremlin as reported by the spokesman for the Russian presidency, Dmitry Peskov on several occasions: the recent openness of the German chancellor-in pectore to the delivery to Kyiv of the cruise missiles always opposed by the Scholz government, namely those Taurus missiles that could then, in principle, arrive in Ukraine after, for a long time, the Chancellery had ruled out this option .
Either a strategic move, Merz’s, to go along with Trump’s bluff and gain points in his eyes by overruling Meloni by showing the White House that she has far superior fact-reading skills should her hypothesis be correct, or an attempt to run for European leadership in this delicate pseudo-Bellicist phase that sees firmly in command of the game that Starmer who is unlikely to aim for a real conflict with Moscow that would weaken the West, for sum not only by promoting a strengthening of the bond between Putin and Xi Jinping, but also by exposing the United States to the risk of not being able to put its hands firmly in security -its security not Kyiv’s- on the Ukrainian strategic materials it needs, which it would never give up and which it believes it has already paid for with arms supplies?
The question is a legitimate one, to say the least, and is justified by the reading in the press of the Sumy bombing described by Trump, as reported by CNN, as a “mistake by Russia ” (Interestingly, when asked to clarify what he meant by Russia’s “mistake,” Trump replied, “They made a mistake. I think it was … look, go ahead and ask them, “ in fact implicitly corroborating Moscow’s claim that he accused Kyiv of using civilians as human shields to protect a legitimate military target); as well as, again on Trump’s part, of the breaking of the Easter truce (about which the current White House tenant has opposed a confidently bombastic very eloquent silence), to which a Zelenskyy has blatantly given course no doubt motivated by the illusory prospect of unconditional support from European ‘friends,’ albeit without the slightest chance of real success, given that it has consisted of hundreds of episodes taking place along a front unmanageable for him in terms of both manpower and means executions.
An articulate event, this second episode, that gave the U.S. President the opportunity to reiterate with his aforementioned silence what CNN reported a couple of days ago, namely that the United States will “give up” mediating further talks between Russia and Ukraine if Moscow or Kyiv (classic blow to the circle and the barrel beyond diplomacy) “make it very difficult” to reach a peace agreement , a concept to which we go to add what Rubio said, who, in fact contextually to Trump, stated for his part “We will not continue with this endeavor for weeks and months” as the United States has “other priorities to focus on.”
Two episodes that, on closer inspection, contributed in no small part to giving Trump ample opportunity to:
make Ukraine appear to the world as a dangerous bomber of Global Peace, and thus when tested give force to his harsh attack on the Ukrainian president a few weeks ago in Washington:
to reiterate Washington’s unwillingness to come to a conflict with Moscow generated by what it has called “Biden’s war,” and thus to reassure Putin about the genuineness of the new course of its U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis a Kremlin that certainly needs new international relations with the United States for obvious strategic reasons, but in a reassuring context given the more than obvious consequences that Trump’s desired step would entail.
Incidentally, there would also have been a third hypothesis for Merz’s projection mentioned above, the one to which President Ricardo Baretzky of ECIPS, the European Union Intelligence and Security Agency, saw fit to call Merz’s own attention to urge him to refrain from setting the European Union on the final path to war in deference to some vague hypothetical militarist projection of his own that is very much out of date: a hypothesis that had to be considered, and appropriately stigmatized as rightly done by President Baretzky, but which I consider decidedly unlikely , although, to be fair, during the election campaign, Merz had promised to unite Europe in the face of challenges from both Russia and the United States.
A position the latter, which can be shared as long as one understands why and even how, as well as having in mind that Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD and one of its challengers, among the demands presented with its program included the immediate lifting of sanctions against Russia and the cessation of arms supplies to Ukraine .
In the face of all this it arises spontaneously to wonder whether Premier Meloni has been adequately informed about these facts, circumstances and hypotheses, if so to what extent and in this sense what real use she intended, or still intends, to make of them in the interest of Italy and the West to whose reconstruction she intended to stand as a candidate.
And indeed, how can one not note with some apprehension what happened in Washington when Meloni had to answer a question about Ukraine?
Watching the video of the press conference anyone can notice how, Meloni having answered in Italian, and Trump having asked for a translation, we have that the images show us an overly embarrassed Premier who passes a hand over her forehead and immediately afterwards interrupts the interpreter in order to address Trump directly in English so as not to risk losing her proverbial …‘balancing’: a ‘balancing act’ all bent on not making it clear what she thinks about Russia and what about Ukraine, trying, with little success, to comply without groveling: something, this, that nevertheless did not escape the notice of those outside Italy who observed the whole thing, starting with CNN, which commented on it, writing, “When Trump began attacking Zelensky during their meeting on Thursday, declaring that he ‘is not a big fan of the Ukrainian president, Meloni chose not to intervene. And while she called Russian President Vladimir Putin the invader , responding in Italian to a question about who was responsible for the war, she interrupted the r mid-sentence before the statement could be read aloud in English for Trump to hear. ‘I will,’ he told the translator, continuing to repeat in English what he had just said about increasing Italy’s defense spending, but leaving out his answer about Putin.”
In the end she spoke of a just peace, which in fact means everything and nothing, especially considering that only until recently it was she herself who offered Zelenskyy her unwavering support both before Zelenskyy’s confrontation with Trump and afterwards, at the early March 2025 meeting convened by Starmer in London.
“Malo esse quam videri” is a Latin phrase whose literal meaning, “preferring to be rather than to seem,” lends itself well to serve as an introductory hat to the cold assessment I propose here of the recent meeting between PM Meloni and the 47th U.S. President.
A meeting whose outcomes, as they were presented by the Italian press, were somewhat overstated first of all with regard to the economic aspects that were not even taken into consideration, which is understandable even if unacceptable data in hand, but whose failure to be examined is likely to translate shortly into a whole series of bitter surprises that will not be long in penalizing in no small measure the state of health not only of Italy but of the whole of Europe, which I doubt will forgive Meloni for having in fact acted blatantly without consultation by posing as a veritable Trojan horse that someone abroad has already stigmatized by paraphrasing the Trumpian MAGA with a scarcely credible MIGA: Make Italy Great Again.
As is well known, the Latin phrase mentioned above stresses the importance of being rather than appearing-a concept that encourages integrity and honesty, suggesting that it is better to be oneself, even if it means not being perceived in a positive way, than to try to look like someone else in order to gain the approval of others. In Italy, “esse quam videri” has been adopted as a motto by various institutions, such as the Auxiliary Coast Guard even Niccolò Machiavelli, in his “Prince,” proposed the opposite concept, “videri quam esse,” that is, “to seem more than to be,” as a strategy for a prince who wishes to maintain power: too bad that in this context that prince is certainly not identifiable with that Giorgia Meloni who would perhaps do better to fill certain cultural gaps unacceptable in the current historical moment.
I say this because even if there had been a concertation with President von der Leyen and she had given her personal green light, things would not be any better for Italy since that hypothetical OK justifying a Community choice in line with the Italian one could be presented by the Chancelleries of the other Community partners as a consequence of the unilateral choice of the Italian government, guilty of having taken decisions that put all the other governments in the position of having no choice but to adapt in order to avoid worse consequences and among them an intestine trade war.
On balance, as things stand, setting aside the political plan, which from everything reported here emerges to be decidedly unflattering or, at best, vague and, as they say in these cases, in the process of being defined, here is that the only net result of the Meloni-Trump meeting-confrontation was that relating to the economic sphere (for of the image damage and risks we have already said) whose outcome can be summarized as follows: if, against the effort she said to have made to defend the USD 45Bn trade surplus with the United States (Italian exports amount to EUR 65Bn a year) we must take into account what Italy has now put into play financially pro US strategic interests, a sum that can be trivially estimated at around EUR 20Bn (equal to about USD 22.6Bn, from the EUR 10Bn of investments mentioned above), we have that the net balance pays a net loss equal to 50% of the aforementioned surplus.
That much, in the end, amounts to the price paid by Italy as a whole for a handful of, on closer inspection, completely useless compliments given that even CNN actually branded Meloni’s performance by writing about how it took her, yes, only a couple of sentences to make her host realize that she was a soul mate, but that this was achieved, as, to be sure, a perfect flatterer, by “using some of President Donald Trump’s favorite code words to describe his battle against what he considers progressive ideals gone mad.”
In other words by putting in place an attempt, described by CNN as “not very subtle,” “to make it clear from the outset that he was not the kind of European leader that Trump has been hosting in the same room over the past two months,” an attempt that was no better received than CNN’s own take on his statement of intent expressed by saying “My goal is to make the West great again (…) And I think we can do it together,” since the proposed comment was “Whether that is Trump’s ambition is another question. Europe is certainly not a priority for Trump. To the extent that he pays attention — on trade and the war in Ukraine— he has been harshly critical, insinuating that the continent has spent the last few decades plotting to ‘screw over’ the United States.”
Which by the way, as the skillful businessman that he is, I doubt that Trump did not realize was put in place for the occasion by the certainly less skillful Meloni who it is to be hoped does not take too much pleasure in the ill-advised positive comments with which the whole thing was received by the Italian press where there were even those who spoke of the “return of the Atlantic axis” making strong of the words with which Trump welcomed her at the White House describing her action by talking of a young, decisive leadership perfectly inserted in the new global balances.
To be sure, in Washington we have witnessed the staging of a new geopolitical equilibrium that speaks the language of the national interest and the cohesive West, although unfortunately we have to note that the cohesive interest in question seems to be decidedly only the U.S. interest even if it passes, but only instrumentally and certainly pro tempore, for having in Rome a leader who shares her hostility to liberal ideals: an opportunity of no small account for Trump at a time when transatlantic ties are strained to the breaking point, but one that does not assume that any concrete benefit for Italy can come from this, given the assumptions.
It goes without saying that it is beyond significant, and should also be of concern, that the current leader of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, despite repeated attempts, has so far failed to get a meeting or even an interview with Trump since taking office, this according to European officials: a circumstance that the same officials believed was attributable to von der Leyen’s strong closeness to Biden on the Ukrainian issue, a closeness that at the moment it is not clear why it was not ascribed as well to that Meloni whom Joe Biden’s administration officials, as indeed Biden himself, welcomed with pleasant surprise when she repeatedly expressed her personal firm support for Ukraine, to say the least by praising even its handling of the G7 in 2024.
These are all elements that it would be interesting to understand why Trump has not seen fit to take into consideration-a choice that it is safe to assume is attributable to a different assessment and weight given to that closeness to his predecessor mentioned above.
An assessment that can be summarized by the simple observation that while Meloni is blatantly a political opportunist, de facto euroskeptic and populist, who jumped on the Biden bandwagon as well as now on the Trump bandwagon only for domestic vested interests (hence the U.S. president’s phrase about Italy being able to be the best U.S. ally “Only if the prime minister remains the prime minister”), von der Leyen from being a staunch pro-European of her heyday (think of her support for European integration policies as well as the Franco-German Treaty of Aachen, just to mention), has changed into an ardent pro-Biden Atlanticist perhaps only obtorto collo due to events related to what has been imputed to her by many for her handling of the vaccine affaire, and in this sense as unmanageable as the Italian, right or wrong her ideals.
In this sense, the fact that Meloni’s opponents in Italy accuse her of duplicity in trying to ingratiate herself with both Washington and Brussels is a kind of testament to her ability to maintain relations with both European and U.S. leaders, an ability that could come in handy to Trump if need be and as such should be held in reserve as an asset.
Could anything better have been done in Washington? Probably not, although under the circumstances, better would have been to avoid exposing Italy to ridicule by issuing rather boastful declarations of intent given that internationally it is well established that its power to gain exemption from Trump’s threatened 20 percent tariffs is limited since any new trade deal would have to be negotiated between Washington and EU officials in Brussels, officials who very little information has been obtained, and that little at all clear, about what Trump seeks from a new deal, as moreover made clear by the EU’s chief trade negotiator who left Monday’s meeting with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
A case? Few and well-confused ideas? I would not say so, and this is for two reasons of which:
the first descends from the simple consideration of the fact that Trump’s strategy seems to be that of someone who likes to disorient the opponent by disrupting the system with apparently contradictory moves that have a common denominator: they disorient, precisely, the opponent by not giving, for sum, the other side time to concert a real effective coordinated response. We have the proof of this by examining precisely the issue of the duties applied to Europe, which has had a decidedly brilliant effect: that of breaking the European front by playing the card of the alleged special, almost privileged relationship with Italy, and in particular with its ambitious Premier who, in exchange for greater visibility and prestige, has in fact granted Trump what he immediately set as a condition for removing the new tariffs: Reducing the trade surplus and obtaining investment in his country from those (states and companies) who intend to export to the U.S., i.e., exactly what PM Meloni reassured will be done at the very moment when the White House was blithely declaring trade negotiations with the EU not a priority of his; and
the second can be inferred from the strange behavior of the US in the Ukrainian affair. As is well known, Trump has repeatedly declared that he wants to end his involvement in the Ukrainian conflict by opening up to Moscow and even going so far as to put Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the door when the latter refused, in Washington, to sign the economic agreement with the U.S. concerning the exploitation of rare earths in his country’s subsoil at the time when the U.S. president refused to join his own, all in all, very understandable request for a specific U.S. commitment to a strategic hedge, a request rejected with disdain by Trump, but strangely readily accommodated by the U.K., which promptly accommodated Kyiv’s wishes at the meeting held in London a few days thereafter. A meeting with decidedly different tones that in fact represented an apparent stance decidedly contrary to the U.S. stance that contributed to the Ukrainian government’s raising the tone without Trump speaking out against this interference in its strategic plans. Something this rather strange given the character of the Tycoon, but perfectly understandable if one thinks of a game of sides put in place between the United States and that United Kingdom that really seems to be Washington’s real counterpart: the United Kingdom and not Italy.
Conjecture? Anything is possible and getting first-hand news in real time at such a fast-moving juncture is not easy, so better to try to evaluate all possible options without lulling too much on easy laurels.
If to all this we add that “The Federal Reserve and the ECB are expected to continue to cut interest rates in the coming quarters, albeit at different rates from each other,” according to the new edition of the World Economic Outlook published April 22 by the International Monetary Fund, the picture is inclined to take on even bleaker hues.
And indeed in the report it can be read that “In the United States, the federal funds rate is expected to fall to 4 percent at the end of 2025 and reach its long-term equilibrium of 2.9 percent at the end of 2028.” Rates in the U.S. are currently in the 4.25-4.50 percent range and on April 21 President Donald Trump again attacked Governor Jerome Powell and called for an immediate reduction in the cost of money. In the euro area, the IMF expects a new rate cut to bring the deposit rate to 2 percent by the middle of the year for a cumulative reduction, including the three cuts already made, of 100 basis points over the year, 50 more than the October forecast.
Simply translated, the similar measure by the ECB and the FED, although sibly geared to pursue the right goal of promoting investment by lowering the cost of money, in fact promises different outcomes on the two sides of the Atlantic since in the end it will still be the United States that is best qualified to attract spontaneous foreign capital, in addition to those raked in obtorto collo, benefiting in sum from an appreciation of its currency, thanks to the reduction in ECB rates, for everything that concerns trade with an EU that will be further penalized on the trade balance front
Interestingly, for Japan, “benchmark rates are expected to be raised at a pace similar to that assumed in October 2024, gradually increasing over the medium term toward a neutral level of about 1.5 percent, consistent with keeping inflation and inflation expectations anchored to the Bank of Japan’s 2 percent target.” a piece of information, this one, that should make us think in no small measure about what is happening in the Pacific area, an area that should be taken into greater consideration in order to understand certain US strategic choices with reference to the area close to us: that of the Atlantic also in order to ask ourselves why Trump’s statement as to the duties applied to China, avoiding easy trivial assumptions, which he assumed would significantly reduce , given that Europeans will be the ones to pay to a large extent.
The duopoly tests for the New World Order continue.
Nuovo Giornale Nazionale
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