I’m in Rome today, and over the past few days I’ve been hearing about how Italians feel about the war in Iran. One subject that keeps coming up is the astonishing decision by the Italian defence minister Guido Crosetto to travel to Dubai for a family vacation right before the attack.
Not only does it show how much Meloni’s government has been kept in the dark by her supposed good friends in the Trump administration, it also shows an incredible level of denial. Even if the US isn’t sharing any intelligence or planning with Italy, anyone reading newspapers could see in the days before the attack that war was imminent and it would majorly destabilise the entire Gulf. For weeks the US had been engaged in its largest military build-up since the 2003 Iraq War – an asset movement which was using US military bases in Italy as transfer posts. Italy evacuated the minister on a military aircraft last weekend, but did not evacuate the other Italians stranded there (including Crosetto’s own family) until later. Evacuated Italians are today arriving at Rome’s Fiumichino airport.
More than three-quarters of Italians have an unfavourable view of Trump according to YouGov surveys. Meloni has suddenly found her supposed alliance with the US president to be a huge political burden that, some are even speculating, could possibly bring down her government. That would be an incredible development for a woman who has become the most politically powerful leader in Europe at the moment. But she now faces the prospect of losing an unrelated referendum on judicial reform scheduled for 22 March, because it has become a de facto referendum on her government and its support for the United States. Failed referendums have brought down Italian prime ministers in the past, including Matteo Renzi in 2016.
Meloni is now desperately spinning her wheels to appear to Trump like she is supporting the war while appearing to Italians like she is not. Her whole political career, she has excelled at such dualism – she is a master chameleon who manages to convince people she is doing everything when she is in fact doing nothing. But as the whole world spirals into chaos as a result of Trump’s war of choice, and energy prices in Italy skyrocket, the enormity of the situation may even be too much for this masterful manipulator to wriggle her way out of.
Italy, along with Germany, is the most militarily occupied country in the EU – a legacy of the conditions of defeat following the second world war. There are US bases and US soldiers scattered across the country. And now Meloni is trying to convince Italians that those bases are not being used by the US to stage its war on Iran – a question triggered by Pedro Sanchez’s decision to expel US military assets from Spain that are being used in the war, which he says is illegal.
Meloni insisted to radio station RTL on Thursday that the US use of its bases in Italy such as the Naval Air Station in Sigonella, Sicily for the operation (which everyone can see has been taking place for over a month based on public flight records) has been limited to “logistical and technical support covered”. She tried to make a cover up what’s really happening here by saying that the bilateral agreements between the US and Italy only allow for logistical operations and direct support for the strikes would require the US to get permission from the Italian government, which she says the US has not asked for. “We’re not at war, we don’t want to go to war,” she insisted.
But this line, which German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is also telling Germans, is simply not credible. “You are leading Italy into war, minister,” Italian MP Angelo Bonelli from the Green and Left Alliance told Meloni’s foreign minister (and former EU commissioner) Antonio Tajani during a debate in parliament on Thursday. “Do you know why? Because when a military aircraft arrives, be it a cargo plane or something else, and goes to perform maintenance or something else, those planes will then go bomb, they will go into the theatre of war, they will provide military logistical support. What’s the difference between military logistical support and someone who goes bombing? It means being at war, and we don’t agree. No, thank you!”
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte inadvertently exposed Meloni’s gaslighting this week when he told the far-right American news channel Newsmax, “NATO is a platform for the United States to project power on the world stage”. That is exactly what NATO countries have been doing during this war, he claimed. He told Newsmax that there is “widespread support” in Europe for the American-Israeli attack on Iran European governments “are basically, on a massive scale, supportive of what the president is doing and are also enabling what the US is doing now in the region.” Either Rutte is lying when he tells the Americans this, or Europe’s leaders are lying when they tell their citizens they’re not involved in this war.
Meloni is far from alone in gaslighting her citizens about what the US is up to on their soil, and this is a situation that goes back decades as I trace in my new book The Owned Continent. We can all see from publicly available records that US aircraft and ships have been using bases in Europe (their own and their ‘allies’) as staging posts for the Iran war preparation over the past month. The idea that the Trump administration would ask any of these governments for permission to do so is laughable. The US government does what it wants on its bases, and Europeans look the other way. Meloni and Merz are gaslighting their citizens by claiming that they aren’t involved. Because the fact is that Europe could have possibly prevented this war by refusing weeks ago to let Trump use European bases to stage it. Europeans did have leverage as they saw the build-up happening, but they chose not to use it. And that speaks to the wider servility on this continent, as I’ll outline below.