Craxi, Erdogan and the "honest bastard" policy

The comparison will seem daring to most, because apparently Bettino Craxi and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have nothing in common but the very practical and un sentimental relationship of friendship with Silvio Berlusconi. For the rest, one was a leader of Eurosocialism and president of the long-term council in the eighties, still the victim of a damnatio memoriae that prevents a serene analysis of the quarter-century from election to secretary of the PSI during the historic congress at the Hotel Midas in Rome until the death, in the last year of the twentieth century, in the voluntary exile of Hammamet. The other from 15 years, with behaviors as father-master of the Turkish nation, heavily influences the destinies of a vast region that goes from North Africa to Iran, passing through the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula and the Balkans, as well as the civil and economic life of Turkey, with liberal reforms in economics and ... of a different nature in its relations with ethnic minorities, oppositions, journalists and education. Of course, we are faced with two characters whose history books will speak for a long time when leaders today most revered by the mainstream media will be long forgotten and forgotten. On closer inspection, however, the two have a very common element in common, which informs their international presence and their relations with the hegemonic power in this part of the world and with the main organization for international and regional security: of course, we speak of the United States of America and NATO. The marking element is, as from the title of this piece, having set these relations to a way of acting as an "honest bastard". But let's go by order ...

Bettino Craxi's Italy plays a fundamental role in the defense of the southern flank of NATO during the last decade of the Cold War: while in Germany the Social Democrats hesitate to give full consent to the installation of the pershing missiles and cruise aimed at the Union In Italy, there is no lack of strong support from the leader of the PSI, which in this way makes an essential contribution to the Soviet defeat in the Cold War^1-2.

Craxi an all-round atlantic? Yes, in the sense of willingness to give serious support in times of need, but no further. The foreign policy of the socialist secretary was always and openly autonomous with respect to an Americanism and to an atlantism of others, incapable of producing a political line to the point of becoming merely servile imitators, not to say waiters, of that of others. This was not the case with Bettino. If support to the Somali socialist dictator Muhammad Siad Barre is to be understood as prophetic, in hindsight, in the light of almost thirty years of uninterrupted conflict in our former colony after its expulsion, no less farsighted is the Italian commitment to save the life of Muhammar Gaddafi before the American raids on Libya in April 1986, considering the leader of the Great Giamahiria a far less danger than a Libya in the grip of an endless civil war or controlled by a government hostile to Italy³.

Much more famous and discussed are the events of the seizure of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, flying the Italian flag, and the subsequent crisis of Sigonella, which see Craxi once again playing a game with the United States almost face-up, which no politician today Italian would dare to face so openly. We recall that in the eighties we are still in the middle of the Cold War and that on the other side there is Ronald Reagan, a president who compares the Barak Obama who moved Silvio Berlusconi and his ministers as pawns during the Libyan crisis of 2011, makes the figure of a half portion in front of a whole lunch. But Craxi is of a different kind ... He knows how to stand up to the Americans not like any Maduro, but as an ally who first of all puts the national interest and the stability of the network of relations built by his own country, without ideological hatred. We recall, for the youngest, that on that frantic night between 10 and 11 October, three circles composed of - inside - a cordon of airmen and carabinieri, in the middle of the Navy Seal raiders and - outside - a second cordon of carabinieri, who had in the meantime arrived from the nearby barracks of Catania and Syracuse, compete for hours, guns in hand, without firing a shot, all in the part of the base under Italian jurisdiction. Finally, at 5:30 am, the commander of the carabinieri, General Riccardo Bisogniero calls in (on Craxi's orders) the armored vehicles of the Arma and other reinforcement units: to which, despite enormous diplomatic as well as military pressures, the American special department receive the order to re-enter.

The comparison is often not so much with the United States as with the middle powers of the Atlantic Alliance: let us remember, in this regard, as the France of Emmanuel Macron, "played" the Italy of Paolo Gentiloni with the Nigerian question. Well, in the 1987 the Craxian leadership has the best on the French maneuvers to place a man liked in Paris instead of the senescent Habib Bourguiba: warned in time, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali takes away the old president and bars the way back French in power in disguise.

On the other hand, we have the prime minister and - from the 2014 - Turkish president who has been able to reap incalculable benefits from the strategic position of his country and from participating in NATO. We often forget the "first Erdogan": the one that normalizes the Greek-Turkish relations, opens a Turkish university in Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, is champion of the referendum for the reunification of Cyprus and promotes economic and political reforms to favor the entry of Turkey in the European Union. Well, there is no "before" and "after": there is the continuity of an "Atlantic" leader who tries to bend with the good and - when these have not been enough - with the bad - or even the bad ones - the nations , the ethnic groups and the economies of the region to the supreme interest of a neo-Islamic and neo-Ottoman Turkey, perfectly inserted into NATO. Armenia, Egypt, Greece, Iraq, Italy, Norway Russia: the countries threatened by the new Sultan of Ankara are no longer counted. Neither those in which the Turkish armed forces and their allies in the field have used force: Syria is only the most macroscopic case, but in reality we should also add non-obvious "victims" like Italy and Russia.

And yet, Erdogan's Turkey is there, at the top of NATO. The Brussels-based organization allowed her to do the good and bad weather, without batting an eyelid: refusing to join Western sanctions against Russia for the Ukrainian crisis, ambiguous relations to say the least with Daesh (the so-called Islamic State), open support to the Muslim Brotherhood (and then to their sponsor, Qatar), autonomous management of relations with Putin's Russia in the most free way (up to the purchase of the S400 anti-missile systems, the world's first ), heavy interference in the territorial waters of Greece and Cyprus and military manu occupation of entire portions of Syrian territory, without passing through NATO or Washington, but with the tacit consent of Moscow.

We are talking about a style different from that of Craxi, but also in a good way of seeing a country, Turkey, still steeped in militarism and in this very far from Italy. But we speak of an identical behavior of "bastard" that does everything on his own, but ... honestly, without ambiguity and without breaking the Atlantic solidarity in its fundamental element, the military in case of extreme need.

For the rest, in Rome in the eighties and in Ankara today, they think the same: apart from the importance of a minimum of Atlantic concertation ... everyone does for himself.

It would be worth asking the "winners" of the 4 March elections if even for Italy a slightly more "bastard" behavior would not be the best way to confirm an "Atlantic solidarity" that someone wants to put into question for reasons ideological. In short, between Craxi / Erdogan on the one hand and Chavez / Maduro on the other, the writer has no doubt which to choose.

David Rossi