The horizons of the world and of Europe are full of black clouds, the weather threatens serious rains of fire and death. The Latin sentences are admirable. With great synthesis they express profound concepts that in Italian would require long turns of wordsAnd. “Bad tempora currunt”literally: there are bad times. With this expression we can complain about how things are going in general in our society or in the contemporary world. Both the global disorder and the threats to Italy are visible.
Ambassador Giampiero Massolo, former Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation,
together with the journalist Francesco Bechis, he has just published a book entitled “Realpolitik. Global disorder and threats to Italy” (Solferino, Milan, 2024, pp. 224, €17.50). What does the title mean? “Concrete politics”, realistic, based on the interests of the country and on the reality (internal or international) of the moment and not on feelings, ideologies, principles; to be precise, the term clear, very clear, was used with reference to the politics of the German chancellor O. von Bismarck (1815-1898), still used today in political journalism.
Ambassador Massolo's book is a light in the total darkness, it puts everyone on alert, it is a call above all to Italy to prepare and equip itself in the face of an anarchic world. The book-essay aims to offer an in-depth and original perspective on Italy's national interest by analyzing the main themes and challenges of international politics in the context of a rapidly changing world. Here is the publisher's profile: “What is the national interest for Italy and what threats emerge for our country in the rapidly changing international scenario? From whom and from what do we have to defend ourselves? How much does intelligence, national and European, matter? How can the war that broke out in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip affect the balance between powers? What role can Europe play with the United States and China? How is Russia moving and what has changed on the Middle Eastern front after the Hamas attack and the Israeli armed response? Does the notion of the West still make sense? And does the North Atlantic Treaty, or rather NATO, still have an important position? The president of ISPI, and former coordinator of the Italian intelligence services, Giampiero Massolo, analyzes actors and moves on the world stage together with Francesco Bechis. And he describes with great realism and pragmaticity the Italian paradox and the contemporary risk between past crises and possible future threats. “Realpolitik” as an essential method for understanding the present and future of Italian internal and foreign politics, between historical migrations from Africa, the European crisis and the new role in the Mediterranean.”
As for Italy, the threats of global disorder fully concern us too. “With realism – write Massolo and Bechis – we must define our national interest, starting from a clear position. For Italy, the Western choice has no alternatives: we are with Europe, with the United States, with NATO”. To delegate to America the role of regulating power of the world, but this is no longer the case, Donald Trump, if he gets to the White House, will probably be even less so. In this case, “the uncertain world would become even more uncertain”. And as far as we are concerned very closely, that is, in relations between the USA and Europe: “No discounts, little transactionality, little consideration of the EU, more emphasis on international relations”. In the Middle East, Trump is expected to push for the resumption of the Abraham Accords, having been the weaver and initiator of a normalization of relations between Israel and moderate Arab countries with an anti-Iranian function. It is the belief of the authors of Realpolitik that “it will be possible to increase the pressure on Iran, betting that a global conflict is not in the interest of the ayatollahs”.
“Today there is no single country that can define all the issues on the global agenda on its own,” explains the Italian diplomat, “we live in an anarchic world with multiple threats in which challenges and conflicts are all potentially existential, think of a war between the USA and China, between the United States and Russia or between Israel and Iran, just as it would be to leave Europe defenseless or do nothing against climate change or to govern artificial intelligence”. It is Massolo again who tells us that “The idea of the book is to offer an interpretation of the dynamics of international relations by offering a tool to look at the world as it is and not as we would like it to be”.
Giampiero Massolo, a career diplomat, has been President of the Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI) since 2017 and President of Mundys since 2022. He was Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2007 to 2012. From 2012 to 2016 he was Director General of the Department of Security Information at the Presidency of the Council. He holds a course on national security issues at the School of Government of the LUISS University of Rome, as well as collaborating with the newspapers La Stampa and La Repubblica on international and security issues.
Carlo Franza