The Covid emergency, the development of 5G networks and the last few bars of the intricate story connected to the Chinese participation in the development of the railway network of the port of Trieste have brought relations between Rome and Beijing back to the center of the debate. There is no doubt that the current Italian government is particularly sensitive to the political and economic references coming from China and that more than someone in Rome - especially among the pentastellates - is tempted by the "new silk road".
Without going into details, the conclusion that can be drawn is that a NATO country even before the EU country has firm roots in the Western bloc and, although it has a certain political-diplomatic autonomy - the so-called "creative sphere" of the theory of concentric circles of Italian foreign policy - in any case it will not be possible to choose, among the privileged partners, the one that has become the main rival power of its own membership.
The tension recorded in recent months between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China does not allow their respective allies sufficient room for maneuver for an autonomous policy; it is a question of choosing whether to support Washington's "democratic capitalism" or Beijing's "authoritarian capitalism" (by now, socialism seems to be out of fashion).
Despite the concrete and immediate economic and commercial advantages that Italy can glimpse from an effective collaboration with the Chinese - with the risk, among others, of having Trieste do the end of the port of Piraeus - the problems are still greater and the angry reactions of the Americans and European partners at the time of the signing of the Italian-Chinese memorandum of understanding of March 2019 give the idea of how certain choices are perceived.
The Italian-Chinese bilateral relations are therefore subject to a substantial difference between the perceived advantages in the short term and the disadvantages in the medium-long term; not to mention that there are areas of the world such as the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa that play a fundamental role in the protection of Italian national interests in which Rome inevitably finds itself in conflict with Beijing.
The Italian theory of the "enlarged Mediterranean" and the US "Indo-Pacific Strategy" respond to the same needs from two different perspectives: while for Rome it is essential to guarantee freedom of navigation in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea as access routes to the Mediterranean, for the United States it is appropriate to recalibrate the balance of power in those waters according to the new course of Trump's foreign policy that has expanded and revised Obama's "Indo-Pacific rebalancing Strategy". Both of these strategic theories have a minimum common denominator in the geopolitical stability of the "Cindoterraneo" and the conditio sine qua non it is the containment of Chinese ambitions.
The new centrality of the Mediterranean has prompted many leading players on the international scene to activate devices - including military ones - to control and safeguard the busiest trade routes to and from the Mare Nostrum. The geographical region of the Horn of Africa is a striking example of the ongoing upheavals: for about twenty years this area of Africa has risen to the role of a crossroads and strategic hub on a world level. A centrality favored by geography and position and justified by its history, as this African region has always been at the center of the political and economic interests of both the great European powers of the late nineteenth century (British Empire, France and the Kingdom of Italy), and of the new global realities that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War (United States and the Soviet Union) and of the unipolar global balances first and then multipolar after 1991 (United States, China and Russia). Both soft power - of which neo-colonial China is the master - and hard power (for this reason, just think of the hyper-militarization of Djibouti) are accepted for the dynamics of maintaining the status quo that of subversion of the same.
Every revisionist hypothesis of the balance of power in the context of a new one scramble for Africa (a real takeover bid launched by China on the economies and infrastructures of the emerging countries of the black continent) is contrary to the interests of Rome and, importantly, of the Atlantic Alliance.
Historically, NATO has been a "power multiplier" for Italy and having a military instrument inserted in the mechanisms of the Alliance can guarantee Rome a political weight higher than the real one. The same naval presence in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea brings Italy closer to the United States and distances it, whatever the pro-Chinese say, from Beijing.
Playing the game of "presence" in the Cindoterraneo in an Atlanticist - or at least Western - perspective will be essential for an Italy that, while struggling to find its own space in the Mediterranean, must not forget the historical lesson according to which to protect its own "garden di casa "in Mare Nostrum you need to have feet - and anchors - firmly planted in the warm seas up to the mouth of Suez. China's activism in the Mediterranean and in the Horn of Africa makes Francesco Crispi's lesson more relevant than ever.
Photo: US Navy / presidency of the council of ministers / chinanews
