10/05/2015 - With the end of the project South Stream Italy has shown, once again, its marginality in foreign policy.
The renewed atlantism of recent times, an oxygen tank for the disrupted international relations of Rome, is definitely drowning access to the energy resources necessary for the economic and industrial survival of the nation, demonstrating how fugitive the ability to move in the global forum with the aim of safeguarding national interests.
Net of the case maró and of the nefarious bombings on the start of synax work in the 2011, the energy emergency connected to sanctions against Russia and the Libya crisis show how gloomy the future of Italian hydrocarbon supplies and the whole industrial policy and all just to please allies inattentive and short-sighted at regional strategic equilibriums, but very wary in the management of economic advantages deriving from instabilities.
The guilty flattening of sanctions on Russia has killed the project South Stream, cosím come il failed state Libyan seriously endangers a source of vital energy for the entire national economic system.
Without a solid and coherent approach in foreign policy, as well as long-term planning, Italian diplomacy is able to support the principle of self-determination of peoples in Kosovo, but denies it to Crimea, it defines Syria as a totalitarian state, but is a partner of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two states that famously use the same "democratic" methods of the Assad regime.
They call it realpolitik and we could even share it, but this should have as its ultimate aim the so reviled and perhaps unknown national interest, that interest used as a screen to go as far as Afghanistan and Iraq, but denied when we say no to so-called western partners.
We are probably prisoners of an endemic inferiority complex linked to the defeat in the second world war, just as we can not overcome the convenient and preordained cold war scheme.
The solution is always there, within everyone's reach and is made of political culture, national interest, understanding of geostrategic dynamics.
If the Italian ruling class were able to combine these elements we could seriously contribute to international stability without denying the interests and needs of 60.000.000 of Italian citizens.
Andrea Pastore
(photo: council chair archive)