I. The Facts

 

On 27 March 2026, several American bombers were already in flight towards Sicily when someone — in Washington or in the operational commands of the U.S. Air Force — remembered to communicate the flight plan to the Italian Air Force. Not a request — a notification. The aircraft were airborne, the route was set, the destination was Sigonella. From there they were to depart towards the Middle East, towards the war against Iran that the United States and Israel have been waging since 28 February 2026.

Defence Minister Guido Crosetto said no.

Chief of Defence Staff Luciano Portolano conveyed the refusal to the American command: the aircraft could not land. They had not been authorised. They did not fall within the categories provided for by the bilateral treaties in force. There had been no prior consultation with the Italian military leadership. Procedure had not been followed — and procedure, in this case, is not bureaucracy: it is the concrete exercise of a people’s sovereignty over its own territory.

It is worth pausing on the structure of this episode, because it contains something more than a procedural violation. The aircraft were already in flight. Authorisation was a detail to be handled while the engines were running, while the routes had already been calculated, while the fuel was burning and the mission had, in effect, already begun. This is not an administrative oversight, the kind resolved with an apologetic phone call and a form filled in late. It is something more structural: the way a system accustomed to moving without asking permission behaves when it forgets, for a moment, that there is someone from whom permission should be sought.

That lapse says more than a thousand geopolitical analyses. It speaks of an architecture of relations in which Italy is present as infrastructure, not as interlocutor. In which the bases on Italian soil are perceived, by those who use them, as operational appendages of a command system headquartered elsewhere. In which formal sovereignty — the kind written into treaties, the kind Crosetto rightly invoked — has coexisted for decades with a substantial subordination that no one has ever seriously called into question.

Today someone has called it into question. And this, regardless of who did so and why, deserves to be examined with the seriousness it demands. It deserves above all to be placed within a historical and theoretical framework that goes beyond the day’s news — a framework that allows us to understand not only what happened on 27 March, but why it matters, what it means, and what should follow. Because episodes pass. Principles, if no one defends them, vanish with them.

 

II. Sigonella, 1985 — The Memory That Burns

To understand what happened on 27 March 2026, we must return to 10 October 1985. That night, on the tarmac of the Sigonella base, the American Delta Force special operations unit found itself face to face with the Italian Carabinieri. The U.S. military had surrounded an Egyptian Boeing that had just landed. The Carabinieri surrounded the American soldiers. For several hours, on that Sicilian base that hosts personnel from both countries, one of the most acute diplomatic crises in the history of postwar Italy played out.

On board the Boeing were four members of the Palestine Liberation Front who had hijacked the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro and killed Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled American tourist, throwing him overboard in his wheelchair. Ronald Reagan had ordered F-14 Navy fighters to intercept the Egyptian Boeing transporting them towards freedom and force it to land in Italy. He wanted the four at any cost — he wanted to try them in America, he wanted the scene, he wanted the political message a U.S. president could send to the world at the height of the Cold War: no terrorist escapes American justice.

Bettino Craxi said no.

It was not an ideological refusal, not anti-Americanism, not the posture of a leader seeking international visibility. It was the application of a simple and unassailable principle: the crimes had been committed in international waters aboard an Italian vessel. Jurisdiction was Italian. On Italian soil — and Sigonella is Italian soil, even if American military personnel work there — Italian law and Italian authorities decide. The American presence at the base is governed by treaties that define what the United States may and may not do. And what Reagan wanted to do that night was not provided for in any treaty.

Reagan backed down. The four were tried in Italy. The diplomatic crisis subsided. But it left a mark: the demonstration that, when an Italian government truly wants to, the line between what is permitted and what is not can be held. It is not an automatic line, it does not hold itself — it requires political will, it requires the readiness to bear a cost. But it can be held.

That night Craxi had been Prime Minister for a year and a half. He was a socialist, secular, fiercely autonomous. He held the line during the Cold War, when Italy depended on the Atlantic umbrella for its very strategic survival, when the political price of saying no to Washington was enormously higher than it is today. Without flinching, with the composure of someone who knows he is right and does not need to raise his voice to prove it. With grace, one might say. But without equivocation.

Forty years later, the scene repeats itself in its essential coordinates. The base is the same. The mechanism is the same — the Americans using Italian soil as if it were their own, Italy reminding them that it is not. But the world around it has changed radically, and that change is the true subject of this essay. Because in 1985 the Sigonella episode was a specific, circumscribed case, a legal dispute over who had jurisdiction over four terrorists. In 2026 the stakes are incomparably higher: it is a matter of establishing whether Italy participates or not in a regional war that could last for years and whose economic and geopolitical consequences have yet to be measured.

 

III. The War We Did Not Choose

To understand why those bombers were in flight towards Sigonella, we must patiently reconstruct the chain of events that led to the current conflict — a chain that begins on 7 October 2023 and has no visible end.

The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 triggered a cascade. Israel responded with a military campaign in Gaza on a scale not seen in decades of Middle Eastern conflict. In parallel, it began striking Iran’s regional allies with increasing intensity — Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Syria and Iraq, Hamas structures outside Gaza. Iran, which had built over the years what it called the Axis of Resistance — a network of Shia armed groups distributed from Palestine to Yemen — saw that network dismantled piece by piece.

In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion: massive air strikes against Iranian military and nuclear targets. Netanyahu presented it as a preventive action to stop Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The United States entered the conflict directly on 22 June, bombing three Iranian nuclear sites. A ceasefire was signed on 24 June 2025 — but it lasted barely more than eight months.

On 17 February 2026, in Geneva, mediated by Oman, Iranians and Americans reached an agreement on some “guiding principles.” Negotiations seemed finally to be moving on reasonable grounds. Washington acknowledged limited but real progress. The direction seemed right.

Eleven days later, on 28 February 2026, while negotiations were still underway, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury: a coordinated campaign of air strikes against Iranian military installations, nuclear sites, and Tehran’s political and military leadership. The operation was presented as a preventive strike. Tehran called it an illegal and unprovoked act of aggression.

This is the point that must be stated with absolute clarity, without rhetoric and without evasion: diplomacy did not fail. It was interrupted. Eleven days separate the Geneva agreement from the bombing of Tehran. Eleven days during which someone concluded that the negotiations were moving too slowly, or that the agreed “guiding principles” were insufficient, or — and this is the hypothesis hardest to exclude — that the military window was open and had to be exploited before Iran could further strengthen its defences. Whatever the explanation, the result is the same: the choice was made to strike while talking.

The Iranian response was not long in coming. Tehran launched Operation True Promise 4: missiles and drones against Israel, against American bases in the region, against Gulf states hosting American infrastructure. Dubai was struck, the Burj Al Arab caught fire, an airport terminal was evacuated. The UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia — all came under attack. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one fifth of the world’s oil passes, was declared under Iranian control. Around a thousand ships were left waiting to cross, including two hundred tankers carrying supplies needed around the world.

The American plan — swift war, decapitation of the regime, collapse of the Islamic Republic through the combined effect of external bombardment and internal pressure — did not work. The regime did not collapse. The leadership held together. The Revolutionary Guards, the Pasdaran, took on a growing role in running the country. And the younger generation of commanders, those who had spent years criticising Khamenei’s “strategic patience” as weakness disguised as prudence, appears to have taken hold of operational decisions. That generation, according to the analyses available, has no intention of stopping.

The conflict has spread. It has become regional in the full sense. And Italy is inside it, whether it wishes to be or not — because the Italian military base at Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, was struck in an attack attributed to Iran during the night of 11 to 12 March 2026. No Italian soldiers were injured, thanks to the bunkers. Minister Crosetto and Minister Tajani condemned the attack while calling for de-escalation. The Supreme Defence Council convened on 13 March, expressing concern.

Concern. The right word, certainly. But a word that does not answer the most uncomfortable question: how did we end up here? Who decided that Italian soldiers should be exposed to Iranian fire in a war that the Italian Parliament never voted on?

 

IV. Iran — A Fixed Point

Before proceeding, a necessary clarification — not to deflect predictable accusations, but because intellectual honesty demands it, and because the argument that follows cannot rest on ambiguities.

Nothing in what follows constitutes a defence of the Iranian regime. The Islamic Republic is a theocracy that oppresses women, persecutes dissidents, and executes those who protest. On 8 and 9 January 2026, Iranian authorities killed thousands of people who had taken to the streets to demand the end of the regime — a massacre condemned by Amnesty International and every human rights organisation worthy of the name. The Iranian regime has nothing progressive, nothing emancipatory, nothing that merits solidarity from those who stand on the side of peoples.

Having said this, clearly and firmly, what follows concerns something else. It concerns international law, the sovereignty of peoples, the principle that the legitimacy of an objective does not authorise any means, and does not authorise anyone to act anywhere without consent. It concerns Italy, not Iran. It concerns the right of Italians not to be dragged into a war they did not choose — regardless of who the enemy of that war might be.

There is a well-worn rhetorical technique, deployed in every recent conflict, for silencing dissent: whoever criticises the intervention is on the side of the enemy. Whoever questions the means is defending the enemy’s ends. Whoever asks that their country not be exposed without democratic consent is a fellow traveller, a naif, a traitor. It is a sophism — and it must be dismantled every time it appears, with the patience it deserves and the firmness it requires.

One can consider the Iranian regime an abominable political system and at the same time consider that attacking it while negotiating, dragging into the war countries that did not choose it, using the soil of allies without asking permission, is a wrong choice — strategically, morally, legally. These are two independent judgements. Their independence is not weakness: it is the condition of any thought that wishes to be honest.

It is worth remembering this, because the pressure to conflate these two levels is intense and constant. Those who dissent are confronted with a false choice: you are with us or you are with them. As if there were no third pole — that of those who stand with their own people, their own country, the democratic right to determine their own destiny. That third pole has an old and honourable name: it is called autonomy. And autonomy, in the socialist tradition, has never been neutrality — it has been the necessary condition for being able to truly choose.

 

V. Historical Coordinates — The Sovereign People as a Socialist Value

Here we must slow down. This is the heart of the argument, and the heart of the argument, to be unassailable, needs solid historical foundations. Because the thesis to be defended — that popular sovereignty is a profoundly socialist value, not a nationalist residue to be archived — requires demonstration, not mere assertion.

There is a current received wisdom, circulated with a certain intellectual laziness in contemporary left-wing circles, that speaking of popular sovereignty is a right-wing argument — populist, nationalist, potentially proto-fascist. Every time someone uses that word in a progressive context, a conditioned reflex kicks in: careful, that is the language of European sovereigntists. It is a false received wisdom, historically unfounded, and the history of socialist thought refutes it with a precision that leaves no room for equivocation.

The conceptual knot to untangle first is this: in socialist thought, popular sovereignty has never been an end in itself — it has always been a tool. The tool through which an organised people can resist the exploitation of external powers, defend its own living conditions, build the institutions necessary for social justice. The nation, from this perspective, is not a mystical entity, not blood and soil, not collective destiny in the romantic-nationalist sense of the term. It is the organisational form that history has given to the working class within a given territory. It is the field on which the game is played — not the team, and still less the trophy.

This distinction is the conceptual firewall against every accusation of fascism. Right-wing nationalism places the nation above the people — the nation as a transcendent reality that precedes individuals, supersedes them, annuls them when necessary. Socialism places the people within the nation — the nation as a tool in the service of the concrete interests of those who live and work in it, a tool that has value insofar as it serves these people and that loses all legitimacy when it is used against them. Inverting this hierarchy — placing the nation before the people — is the betrayal that transforms a progressive principle into a reactionary one.

Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, are explicit on this point: the proletariat must conquer political power, must “raise itself to the position of national class,” must itself become the nation. There is no emancipation without the State, and the State, in the historical reality of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is national. It is no coincidence that the Manifesto devotes some of its densest pages to the relationship between class struggle and the national question: the two levels do not exclude each other, they interweave. Socialist internationalism is not the renunciation of sovereignty — it is solidarity between sovereign peoples, the federation of the interests of workers from different countries who recognise each other as allies in the same struggle, not as subjects of a supranational order that none of them chose.

Jean Jaurès, the great French socialist leader assassinated in July 1914 precisely because he opposed the coming war with every means available, had developed on these matters a position of extraordinary lucidity. Peace, for Jaurès, was neither sentimentalism nor utopia: it was a class interest. Wars are made by the powerful — industrialists who sell arms, financiers who lend money to belligerent states, politicians who use nationalism as a tool of domestic consensus. Wars are paid for by the poor — with their lives in the trenches, with misery in working-class districts stripped of their young men, with public resources taken from social policies to finance cannons. Jaurès was not a pacifist on abstract principle: he was a socialist who could read the mechanisms of power with a precision that his heirs have often lost.

In Italy, this tradition has a precise name: Pietro Nenni.

In the nineteen-fifties, as Italy built its postwar political identity within the Atlantic system, Nenni represented the voice of autonomy. He opposed NATO, criticised the Marshall Plan as an instrument of economic and political subordination as well as material reconstruction, maintained for years a position of equidistance between the blocs that cost him dearly in terms of international credibility. He did not do so out of sentimental pro-Sovietism — Nenni was no innocent, he knew the Soviet system’s limits. He did so out of principle: the Italian labour movement cannot be the armed wing of any foreign power, neither Soviet nor American. It must remain autonomous, must preserve the capacity to judge and to choose, must defend the interests of the Italian people as such and not as a pawn in a geopolitical design decided elsewhere.

When the USSR revealed its true face — with tanks in Budapest in November 1956, with the brutal repression of a popular uprising that demanded freedom and autonomy — Nenni did not hesitate. He returned the Stalin Prize, a symbolic act of clean rupture. He broke with Moscow, setting the PSI on the path that would lead to the centre-left politics of the nineteen-sixties. But he did not abandon the fundamental principle: sovereignty applies to everyone. It applies to Hungary under Soviet tanks just as it applies to Italy under the American umbrella. The principle is not negotiable depending on who violates it, and it does not become less important because it is uncomfortable to apply it when the violator is an ally.

And then there is Craxi — the highest, the clearest, the most cinematic moment of this tradition. The moment when an abstract principle met a concrete situation, with a real cost and a real choice to be made.

Sigonella 1985 is not a folkloric episode of Italian history, good for commemorations and nostalgic re-enactments. It is the practical, verifiable, documented demonstration of what it means to apply the principle of popular sovereignty when applying it costs something. Reagan was no ordinary interlocutor — he was the President of the United States at the height of the Cold War, the guarantor of the nuclear umbrella under which Italy slept, the man who kept the USSR in check with his policy of rearmament and pressure. Saying no to him had a price. Craxi paid it — politically, in Atlantic relations, in terms of international image, in terms of personal relations with an American administration that does not easily forget a no.

He did it anyway. Because on Italian soil, Italian law applies to everyone, allies included. Because jurisdiction is not surrendered in exchange for protection, without becoming something other than what one claims to be. Because a country that abdicates its own autonomy to please a more powerful ally is not an ally — it is a satellite. And satellites have no history, no dignity, no capacity to defend the interests of their own people when those interests conflict with those of the planet around which they orbit.

This is the line. From Marx to Jaurès, from Nenni to Craxi. It is unbroken, documented, and proud. It is not fascism — it is the backbone of the finest Italian and European progressive tradition. Whoever confuses it with right-wing nationalism either does not know the history, or knows it and chooses to ignore it for reasons of immediate political convenience. In either case, they are not a serious interlocutor.

 

VI. The Intellectual Betrayal of the Contemporary Left

From the nineteen-nineties onwards, in the European and particularly the Italian left, a silent substitution took place — gradual, almost imperceptible in its individual steps, but systematic and profound in its overall effect. A substitution that concerned not only political programmes, not only governmental alliances, but the very vocabulary with which the left thinks and speaks.

'Popular sovereignty' became governance — an English, technocratic word evoking procedures and regulations rather than peoples and interests. National interests — a category the socialist tradition had used without embarrassment, because the interests of the Italian people are national interests — became universal values, abstract, independent of any specific territory and any specific people. Representing those who work, who produce, who pay taxes and bear the consequences of crises, became representing those who are outraged, who demonstrate, who champion just causes often far removed from the daily life of the majority.

The concrete people — those with their material needs, their wages that have not grown in twenty years, their energy bills that rise every time there is a fuel crisis, the price of diesel that goes up when American bombers take off somewhere in the Mediterranean — disappeared from the left’s political discourse. Replaced by abstract categories, by post-materialist rights that are entirely legitimate but insufficient to build a political representation capable of governing, by a public morality ever more sophisticated and ever less capable of touching the real living conditions of the majority of people.

The practical result is plain to see and requires no lengthy demonstration. Every time someone says that Italians should not pay for American wars, that Italian soil cannot be used as an operational platform for conflicts the Italian Parliament did not choose, the left’s response is as predictable as a conditioned reflex: careful, the right uses that argument too. As if the truth of a statement depended on the political provenance of the person making it. As if the price of oil rose or fell depending on the party identity of whoever is observing it. As if the lives of Italian soldiers at Erbil were worth more or less depending on who asks to account for their being exposed to that risk.

This is the short-circuit — not political, but intellectual. It is not a mistaken tactical choice, not a communication error, not a misreading of electoral consent. It is the abandonment of analysis in favour of managing tribal belonging. It is the transformation of politics from the practice of governing collective interests into the practice of identity distinction: we are those who do not say certain things because those things are said by the bad people. It is politics as hygiene, not as a project.

The left has stopped conducting class analysis of war. It has adopted the Atlanticist frame — Western values versus authoritarianism — without asking who pays the material cost of this narrative, who is the concrete subject bearing the concrete consequences of military choices made in the name of those values. Italian workers who see the price of petrol rise every time the energy markets are destabilised by a new conflict. North-eastern manufacturing businesses that depend on gas arriving via increasingly insecure routes. Pensioners who watch their purchasing power eroded by the energy inflation that every Gulf war produces with mechanical certainty. These people are not an abstract category. They are the people the left has stopped representing, distracted by the search for more mobile, more visible political subjects, better suited to the logic of social media and street demonstrations.

There is more, and it must be said with the same frankness. There exists a historical paradox of extraordinary bitterness: at this moment, the defence of Italian popular sovereignty — the principle that Italian soil cannot be used for wars the Italian people did not choose — is being practised, imperfectly and not always for transparent reasons, by a centre-right government. Crosetto said no to the American bombers. Parliament has voted on nothing regarding Italian participation in the conflict — and this is a serious democratic problem, but it is also, in practical terms, a form of passive resistance to Italy being dragged into a war that is not ours.

The left finds itself in the grotesque position of being unable to applaud a right action because it is performed by the political enemy. It cannot separate judgement of the government — legitimate, necessary, required — from judgement of the specific action. And so, on one of the most important questions of recent decades, it falls silent or stumbles. It hides behind the generic condemnation of war — right, but insufficient — without engaging with what this conflict means for the concrete Italian people, without calling to account those who exposed our soldiers at Erbil, without demanding that Parliament vote, without doing the most elementary thing a left-wing party should do: stand with those who pay.

This is the measure of the failure. Not electoral, though electoral failure is its visible consequence. Intellectual. The loss of the capacity to reason in terms of interests, to ask who benefits from a choice, to name with precision who is the subject bearing the consequences of every political decision. Without that capacity, the left is not an alternative: it is a moral appendage of the system it claims to want to change.

 

VII. Aviano — The Other Sigonella

There is a base that receives little attention in these days of discussion about Sigonella and the refused bombers. It is called Aviano, it is in the province of Pordenone in Friuli, and it hosts the 31st Fighter Wing of the U.S. Air Force with its F-16 Fighting Falcons. It is one of the most important American bases in Europe, and it is as Italian as Sigonella — in the sense that it stands on Italian soil, is governed by the same bilateral treaties, and the same formal limits apply to its use.

While public debate focused on Sigonella and the bombers denied landing, Aviano was operating. The movements of American military aircraft to and from Italian bases have been continuous since the start of the conflict, documented by independent observers tracking military air traffic through transponders and publicly available flight logs. Transport aircraft, reconnaissance aircraft, aircraft falling within the categories of logistical flights permitted by the treaties — but also, according to some journalistic reconstructions, fighter-bombers in tactical configuration whose movements have raised questions that have not received satisfactory answers.

This is not necessarily illegal, and must be stated with the precision the subject demands. The bilateral treaties provide for a series of permitted uses without prior authorisation from the Italian government: refuelling, logistics, surveillance, support for NATO operations. The problem is that the line between these permitted uses and direct operational support for military missions the Italian government has not authorised is not always clear, not always verifiable in real time, and not always monitored with the rigour the situation would require.

The question that no one poses with the necessary seriousness in Parliament is this: what exactly is the perimeter of what American bases in Italy can do without asking permission? The NATO SOFA of 1951, the Bilateral Infrastructure Agreement of 1954 updated in 1973, the Italy-USA Memorandum of Understanding of 1995 — these documents were written in a world that no longer exists, with an America that no longer exists, for strategic scenarios belonging to another historical era. There is, however, a detail that further aggravates the picture: the bilateral treaties on American bases in Italy are covered by state secrecy. Their exact content is not publicly available. Italians do not know, in detail, what they have agreed to. They do not know what is permitted and what is not, where logistics ends and where operational support for military missions begins. This opacity is not a technical defect of the system — it is a political choice. And a democracy that accepts not knowing the terms on which its soil is used is not entirely its own master. The world of 1954 was that of nuclear deterrence, the Iron Curtain, the Soviet threat at Europe’s gates. In that context, the American presence in Italy had a clear and shared defensive function: protecting Western Europe from Soviet expansionism. One may debate whether that function justified the secrecy. One cannot debate whether the secrecy is acceptable in 2026, when those treaties are invoked to decide whether American bombers can or cannot use Italian soil to go to war in Iran.

The world of 2026 is structurally different. The Soviet threat no longer exists in the form that justified those agreements. And the American silence that followed Crosetto’s refusal — no formal protest, no official reaction, according to available sources — should not be read as respect. It should be read as the calculation of someone who knows the game is long, that relations with Italy matter and it is worth not inflaming them further, that the moment for a more explicit discussion of the bases and their uses will come. Italy would do well to prepare for that conversation rather than waiting for it to arrive improvised.

 

VIII. Spain — The Mirror

 

The comparison with Spain is not intended to diminish Crosetto’s gesture — which must be recognised for what it is: an act of institutional courage in a difficult moment, with a powerful ally unaccustomed to receiving refusals from those it considers part of its base system. An act with an illustrious precedent, as we have seen, and one that fits within a tradition of defending Italian sovereignty that belongs to no particular political camp.

The comparison serves to illuminate something different: the difference between two types of response, two levels of political awareness, two ways of understanding the relationship with an ally in wartime.

Madrid did not merely deny the use of the military bases at Rota and Morón to American forces engaged in the operation against Iran. It did something more radical and more significant: it closed its own airspace to American military aircraft involved in that operation. Not the soil, not the bases — the sky. A gesture that does not concern a procedural violation, that does not respond to a specific episode, but that asserts a clear political position: we do not want this war, we do not want to be part of it in any form, and Spanish airspace will not become the corridor through which bombing missions pass without our being informed and without our having chosen.

The difference from the Italian response is not one of degree — it is not that Spain did more and Italy less. It is a difference in kind, in register, in the level at which the response is formulated. The Italian no was an administrative and legal no: you violated the procedures provided for by the treaties, therefore you cannot land. It is a correct no, technically impeccable, politically courageous. But it remains within the logic of the existing treaties — it demands their application, without questioning their structure.

The Spanish no was something different: a political no, which steps outside the logic of the treaties to make a choice of positioning. Not “you did not request authorisation,” but “we do not want this war.” Not a reaction to an episode, but the assertion of a position. These are two different things, and the difference matters.

Italy, after Crosetto’s no, has not made that choice. It responded to an episode, restored respect for procedures, sent a signal to Washington. But it said nothing about the war as a whole — it took no position on the substance of the conflict, defined no orientation, indicated to neither Italians nor allies where it stands in this crisis. It is a posture of calculated ambiguity, understandable in the logic of foreign policy of a country that does not want to break with anyone. Understandable, but insufficient as a response to a crisis of this magnitude.

The question Spain poses to Italy, by the mere fact of having chosen, is simple and slightly embarrassing: what does Italy want? Not what does this government want, not what does this minister want, not what do the treaties of 1954 impose. What does Italy want, as a country, as a people, as a political community that has the right and the duty to decide its own destiny?

The history of postwar Italy offers resources for answering. Not only Craxi and Sigonella — also De Gasperi negotiating with the Americans from a position of national dignity even within the Atlanticist choice, also Moro building an Italian foreign policy in the Mediterranean, seeking margins of autonomy that Washington did not always welcome. Italy has a tradition of negotiating with its allies that belongs to no political camp but that all political camps, in their better moments, have known how to practise. The problem is that those better moments have been rare, and the moments of silent subordination have been the norm. Today, perhaps, a space is opening to reverse that proportion.

 

IX. What Do We Want — The Political Question

It is not a rhetorical question. It is not a question posed for the pleasure of posing it, already knowing it will go unanswered. It is the most concrete and urgent question a democracy can put to itself: a question concerning lives, resources, security, and the future. And it is the question that should have been asked earlier — before the bombers were in flight, before Erbil was struck, before fuel prices rose and the Strait of Hormuz became a battlefield.

The Italian Parliament has never voted on participation, direct or indirect, in this conflict. There has been no motion, no formal parliamentary debate on Italian involvement, no consultation of the Supreme Defence Council before operations began. And yet Italian soldiers at Erbil were struck on 12 March. And yet Italian bases have been used for operational support activities since the start of the conflict. And yet the energy cost of the war falls every day on Italian families, Italian businesses, the Italian economy.

We are already inside it. No one decided this democratically. This is not an accusation — it is a statement of fact. It is a description of how the architecture of agreements and relations binding Italy to the United States and the Atlantic alliance actually functions: an architecture with its own logic, self-reproducing, tending to involve automatically all those who are part of it without the need for an explicit choice each time. It is an architecture built for another era, but one that continues to function — and to produce consequences — in the present era.

This is the point that must be stated with the utmost clarity, without raising the temperature and without demagoguery: the question is not to choose between America and Iran, between the West and its enemies, between democracy and theocracy. No one is proposing to break with NATO, to expel the American bases, to align with Tehran. The question is more elementary and more fundamental: it is a matter of deciding — as a country, as a people, through the democratic mechanisms we have given ourselves — whether we wish to participate in this war, to what extent, on what terms, with what awareness of the consequences.

That decision has not been made. No one has asked the Italians. And the fact that no one asks — neither the government, which prefers the posture of calculated ambiguity, nor the opposition, which cannot find its voice on these matters, nor the public debate in its dominant form, trapped between Atlanticist cheerleading and Third-Worldist nostalgia — is already an answer. An answer by default. A silent subordination perpetuating itself through inertia, because it demands nothing, because it disturbs no one, because it is the path of least resistance in an alliance system that rewards those who ask no questions.

The concrete proposal — not wishful, not anti-Atlanticist, not utopian — is this: a negotiated revision of the agreements on American bases in Italy in light of the current context. Not expulsion, not rupture of the Atlantic alliance, not symbolic gestures that change nothing in substance. Renegotiation — that is the word, and it deserves to be stated clearly. A renegotiation that defines with greater precision the limits of permitted uses, that provides for mandatory prior consultation mechanisms for all operations that are not purely logistical, that establishes clear parliamentary procedures for cases in which Italian bases are used for military missions, that updates the legal framework from 1954 to 2026.

This is not a revolutionary proposal. It is a proposal of democratic common sense. It is what a mature country, with a rich political tradition and a history of autonomy dating back at least to Craxi, should be able to put to its allies without this being interpreted as a hostile act. If it is interpreted as a hostile act, the problem is not in the proposal — it is in the quality of an alliance that does not tolerate junior partners having a say in the terms of the partnership.

Socialism has never asked the impossible. It has always asked, with patience and method, that the people know, decide, choose. That the choices concerning everyone’s lives be made by everyone, through the mechanisms of representative democracy. That war — if war there must be — be a conscious choice, debated, voted upon, and not the automatic consequence of treaties signed when Eisenhower was president, Stalin had just died, and no one could have imagined the world in which we find ourselves today.

 

X. Without Nostalgia

This is not a nostalgic essay. Craxi is not coming back. The PSI is not coming back. The twentieth century is not coming back, with its ideological certainties, its mass parties that knew precisely whose expression they were and whose enemies, its political geography in which positions were clear and lines were marked. What was, was, and grief for what is no longer is a waste of energies that would be better spent understanding what is.

But principles remain. They remain because they do not belong to an era — they belong to a logic. The logic by which those who pay the consequences of a choice should be able to participate in that choice. The logic by which an alliance between nations is not the cancellation of each one’s sovereignty, but the voluntary federation of sovereignties that respect each other, that negotiate, that confront each other as equals. The logic by which peace is not the absence of war — not the silence of weapons while awaiting the next explosion — but an active condition that is built, defended, chosen each time, with the awareness that the alternative choice always carries a cost that someone pays and that someone is never the one who decides.

Taking a stand today means reclaiming that tradition — not as a museum, not as a relic to display on commemorative occasions, but as a compass for navigating a present that has lost many of its reference points. It means saying, with the steady voice of one who knows where they come from and where they want to go, that this soil is not American property. That this people is not a strategic variable for Washington, a cost to be optimised in the calculations of a power that pursues its own interests with the casualness of one that has not learned to ask permission. That whoever truly wishes to represent this people — from the right, from the left, from the centre, from whatever political position — must have the courage to say so, clearly, publicly, in a way that leaves no room for ambiguous interpretation.

Craxi was right in 1985 — right in his method, in his principle, in his readiness to pay a price for what he believed in. Crosetto did the right thing in 2026 — applied the rules, defended the procedure, said no when no was due. These two sentences, placed side by side, are not a contradiction: they are the map of a country that traverses decades, changes governments, changes majorities, changes political language, but that preserves, in the moments when someone has the courage to uphold it, a fundamental principle. The principle that the sovereign people is the one that decides, not the one that endures.

The most difficult question remains open: who has the courage to uphold it systematically, not only in individual episodes, not only when the violation is so glaring it cannot be ignored? Who has the courage to build, with patience and method, an Italian position on this war that is the fruit of a conscious choice and not the residue of a historical inertia? Who has the courage to bring this question to Parliament, to call for a vote, to let the people decide?

These are open questions. This essay does not claim to close them. It claims, more modestly and perhaps more usefully, to make them harder to ignore.

Because ignoring them has a cost. Not metaphorical — real. It is paid by the lorry driver who fills up and finds diesel at two euros twenty. It is paid by the company that orders raw materials and discovers that supply chains have broken again. It is paid by the soldier serving his country at Erbil who that March night heard the explosions drawing closer, without anyone in Rome having ever decided that he should be there at that moment, in that conflict, in that war. Ignoring the questions does not make them disappear: it transforms them into consequences. And the consequences, as always, are paid by those who never had a say.

Socialism was born to give a say to those who have none. It was born to name the mechanisms of power, to make visible the hidden costs of the decisions of the powerful, to build the conditions in which the people — the concrete people, those who work and pay and endure — can truly decide. It is not a finished project. It is not an outdated project. It is a project that every generation must relearn to make its own, with the language and tools of its own time. This is the time. This is the place. Sigonella is the point from which to begin again.

 

With grace. But without equivocation.