The facts of the last week are known to almost everyone. During a meeting at the White House, Donald Trump and his deputy JD Vance quarrelled with Ukrainian President Zelensky live on air.
The pretext was a blunt response from Zelensky who, faced with the boast that Trump’s ‘diplomacy’ would be more effective than Biden’s support, recalled how the agreements with Putin signed during the first Trump presidency had all been violated.

The two Americans reacted with an avalanche of false and superficial, if not patronising and mafia-like, statements: they accused the Ukrainian of being ungrateful, of having scrounged 350 billion from America (a totally invented figure), of gambling with the lives of millions of people as well as with the third world war, of not having good cards, of having put his country in a big bind, of not being in a good position, of not having more men to send to the front. When they saw Zelensky retorting point by point, they broke off the meeting.

More than one observer commented that the confrontation may have been artfully mounted, to justify a decision on Ukraine that Trump had in fact already made. But this changes little from the bigger picture.

The billionaire, for electoral reasons, would like to impose a truce between Russia and Ukraine as soon as possible and at any cost, perhaps showing his fanatical supporters some material profit for the USA(the famous ‘rare earths’).
Unfortunately for him, however, the Russian regime and the Ukrainian people have totally irreconcilable demands on the conditions under which they would accept a truce. The Ukrainians this time demand a concrete guarantee for their future: entry into NATO, nuclear bombs or a European army deployed to defend them.
Putin, for his part, cannot accept any of these three outcomes, and, on the contrary, insists on annexing the entire regions of Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhija (where his army is immobilised and has lost half a million troops in a year without making any tangible progress).

So, for the hapless Trump, there is no ‘diplomacy’ that holds: eventually he will be forced to throw either Russia or Ukraine off the tower. And since the men in his circle, his official communiqués and some of his decrees seem to manifest a disturbing alignment with Putin and a total sacrifice of Ukraine, Europe has not stood idly by.

Less than 48 hours after the White House squabble, King Charles received Zelensky in turn, accrediting him as a legitimate head of state against all slander spread by the Trumpians.
Then British Prime Minister Starmer brought together the leaders of the major European countries, Turkey and Canada to prepare for the eventual arrival of the ‘worst of all possible worlds’: the one in which America and Russia ally themselves in the skin of the smaller democracies.

Let’s be clear: it is not certain that the ‘worst of all possible worlds’ will actually arrive. But preparing for the ‘worst of all possible worlds’ is the best strategy to avert it. The more useless and costly the ‘devil’s pact’ with Putin appears, the more difficult it will be for the Americans to enter into: and if the major European countries, Turkey and Canada join forces to make it useless and costly, they stand a good chance of succeeding.

Let us also be clear about another fact: the one between the Europeans, Turks and Canadians will necessarily be a downward compromise. For example, there is no consensus on transferring to Ukraine the almost 200 billion Russians seized in Europe: there are too many fears that this will trigger capital flight in the future.
Only three countries (France, Great Britain and Canada), plus possibly Germany, have said they are willing to send ground troops or air squadrons to protect Ukraine if Trump sells it out to the Russians in a seizure deal. They are among the largest and most powerful, of course, but they may not be enough.
The intervention of militarily strong Turkey is never gratuitous and often harms the foreign interests of some countries on the old continent.

Yet, however downbeat, the decisions taken have been momentous. Ukraine will continue to have financial assistance (there is talk of at least 40 billion), will continue to have military supplies (there is talk of 5,000 anti-aircraft missiles from the British alone) and will have a small international contingent ready to protect it in the event of a truce. Behind it, Europe will begin to rearm, while France is already talking about sharing atomic weapons with the rest of Europe.

“Why doesn’t Meloni act like Draghi?”

In this general fibrillation, Italy’s hesitations have been conspicuous. French President Macron yesterday put his finger on the sore spot: “Why doesn’t Meloni act as Draghi did?“
The answer is easy: because Meloni is tied to a network of domestic (Salvini above all) and international (Trump, Musk, Orbán) alliances that demand the opposite from her. Moreover, Meloni has to win electoral consensus in a media environment, the Italian one, which for decades has habituated its public to a complacent scepticism towards the value of freedom, the rule of law and above all the use of force to defend them. This has been the premise for the flood of fake news, first anti-European and then anti-Ukraine, which has overwhelmed the ‘traditional media’ no less than the social media.

For Italian public opinion, in short, direct intervention against Russia and in defence of Ukraine would be indigestible. But it would also be problematic to oppose Trump, ‘the most powerful man in the world’, to join an improvised coalition of countries towards which ‘sovereignist’ rhetoric has sown rancour for decades.

The opposition is no help at all: Elly Schlein’s last hallucinating speech, with that ‘neither with Trump’s fake pacifism nor with Europe to continue the war‘, succeeded in the arduous feat of being both disingenuous and self-contradictory. Because the PD’s base, after all, shares the same scepticism as the rest of Italy when it comes to the values for which Ukraine is fighting: it simply disguises it under delicate and virtuous sentiments, such as pacifism, anti-nationalism, fear of cuts in social spending or horror at the enrichment of the ‘arms lobby’. When Romano Prodi says that Ukraine should be ‘a buffer state‘, he does not even perceive the illiberal violence that is inherent in his words.

The choice to be made

So the margins of manoeuvre for Meloni are narrow. But they are not non-existent.
The best choice she could make, in my opinion, is to lead a southern flank of the European army, to counter Putin’s minor allies in the Balkans and North Africa.
It would not appear to be the prelude to a world war, it would respond to undeniable national interests, and it would touch emotional chords, those of Srebrenica and the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, which in most Italians have not been polluted by the deluge of propaganda lies that has instead swept over Ukraine.

Secondly, Meloni can immediately stand up for the free trade agreements with Mexico and the Mercosur area (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay), where Italy is the needle of the scales and has much to gain. Bringing these agreements into force would cushion the damage of any tariffs by Trump and show that the Europeans, far from being his minor vassals, can even contest his backyard.

On this ‘soft’ line, both Forza Italia and Elly Schlein would struggle to raise objections. The world has its eyes on us: let us not disappoint it.