Freeing Ourselves from the Liberators

A War That Does Not Protect Us

There is one point Europe continues to avoid, as if it had become inconvenient even to name it: the attack on Iran is not merely another episode in the long hostility between the United States, Israel, and the Islamic Republic. It is also, and perhaps above all, yet another demonstration that European strategic interests have long ceased to coincide with those of our Atlantic allies. And yet we continue to behave as if nothing had changed.

The offensive launched while negotiations were still underway is not surprising because of its military nature. It is surprising only to those who still insist on believing that Washington and Tel Aviv genuinely feel bound by common rules, shared procedures, or any duty of consultation toward their allies. In reality, the logic remains the same: they act, they strike, they redefine the facts on the ground, and only afterward do they inform those who are expected to fall into line. There is no collegiality. There is hierarchy. And in that hierarchy, Europe is not a partner: it is a support zone, a political, economic, and logistical rear base to be used whenever convenient.

The fact that the Italian government was informed only after operations had already begun is not a diplomatic incident. It is the portrait of a structural condition. Europeans are kept at the margins not because they are insignificant in terms of geography or resources, but because they have become insignificant in terms of political will. They do not decide, they do not impose conditions, they do not make the cost of their consent felt. They are therefore treated accordingly.

Exceptionalism as a Method

For many years, the United States and Israel have applied a simple rule: force is legitimate when they use it. Preventive strikes, selective incursions, targeted eliminations, sabotage, extraterritorial pressure—everything is framed as security, even when it produces systemic instability. If the same actions were carried out by others, we would describe them in far harsher terms. But Western exceptionalism works precisely in this way: it turns violence into a prerogative and law into an instrument with variable geometry.

The decisive point, however, is not moral. It is political. Every time Washington and Tel Aviv strike unilaterally in an energy-dense region, Europe pays a direct price. It pays in security, in supply vulnerability, in commercial instability, in exposure to migration flows, in lost industrial competitiveness. And yet it continues to present as “defensive” a strategic line that, in practice, exposes and weakens it.

The so-called Arab uprisings, the wars in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, the permanent disorder in the wider Mediterranean, the rupture of the energy relationship with Moscow, the transformation of Ukraine into a military fault line in the confrontation with Russia: in each of these phases, Europe gained neither autonomy nor security. It lost room for maneuver, paid more for energy, weakened its productive structure, and became more dependent on the choices of others.

The Gulf as an Economic Detonator

Those who think the Iranian crisis is a distant matter are not looking at the map of energy and commercial flows. The Persian Gulf and the straits linking it to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean are not merely military spaces: they are arteries of the world’s economic metabolism. A simple rise in perceived risk is enough to increase insurance premiums, alter routes, slow shipping, inflate the price of oil, and destabilize markets.

Even without a total closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the mere threat of disruption produces immediate effects. For the United States, this can mean a relative advantage: higher prices make certain domestic production more profitable, especially non-conventional extraction, which is far more expensive and viable only at certain price levels. For Europe, by contrast, it means exactly the opposite: a new energy shock hitting economies already strained by inflation, deindustrialization, and the loss of low-cost Russian supplies.

This is where the full geoeconomic dimension of the conflict emerges. We are not simply facing a military campaign. We are witnessing a forced redistribution of costs and benefits within the Western camp itself. The United States exports energy, military capability, and strategic direction. Europe imports instability, higher prices, and subordination. It is an unbalanced relationship that we still call an alliance only out of linguistic inertia.

The Wider Mediterranean and the Damage to Europe

For Italy, the issue is even more obvious. For years, it has been said that the wider Mediterranean is our fundamental strategic space: from the Levant to the Red Sea, from the Horn of Africa to the Gulf. But if that is truly the case, then the destabilization of this area should be perceived as a direct threat to national interests. And yet we continue to endure operations that worsen precisely the disorder we should be trying to contain.

The renewed threats to merchant shipping in the area stretching from Bab el-Mandeb to the Gulf of Aden prove it. Every tension in this space strikes the trade lines between Asia and Europe, penalizes Mediterranean ports, raises transport costs, slows supply chains, and harms our foreign trade. It takes little imagination to understand that war against Iran does not remain confined to Iran. It spreads in concentric circles and reaches the economic heart of Europe.

European naval missions, presented as a response, have an obvious limitation: they may contain, but they cannot reverse the strategic dynamic. Too few units, constrained resources, limited ammunition stocks, and an uncertain political mandate. They are instruments of presence, not transformation. And that is precisely why they do not alter the essential fact: Europe is subjected to a theater that others set on fire.

The Hypocrisy of Labels

This crisis also reveals an enormous semantic hypocrisy. Iran is labeled a “regime” as if the use of that word alone were enough to establish an absolute moral hierarchy, while the same label is carefully avoided for hereditary Gulf monarchies where the space for political pluralism and civil rights remains extremely limited. The reality is that international politics is not governed by coherent principles, but by an opportunistic selection of words.

The same applies to the demonization of the Revolutionary Guards. It is entirely legitimate to view them as an instrument of Iranian power, an ideological and offensive armed apparatus, but reducing the entire issue to the formula of terrorism mainly serves to erase the complexity of the Middle Eastern landscape. Over the last twenty years, the Shia world has often been one of the hardest barriers against radical Sunni jihadism. That is a historical fact, not a moral judgment. Ignoring it means preferring propaganda to analysis.

The rehabilitation of figures and militias that were once considered untouchable, and are now embraced because they are useful to the current balance of power, also shows how little proclaimed values matter when strategic interests are at stake. Power politics is always pragmatic. The problem is not that it is pragmatic. The problem is pretending that it is not.

The Illusion of Regime Change

Even if the real objective is to destabilize Iran to the point of facilitating a change of power, one question remains that no one wants to confront seriously: what happens afterward? Recent history offers answers that are already too clear. When a center of command is overthrown or weakened without a political structure ready to replace it, what almost always follows is a phase of chaos, fragmentation, and diffuse violence.

Iran is neither Libya nor Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It is a stronger state, with an institutional tradition, a deeply rooted security apparatus, a powerful national memory, and a resilience its adversaries often underestimate. Striking the summit of power may even produce the opposite of the intended effect: strengthening the hardest factions, marginalizing reformists, tightening the system around its coercive organs, and nationalizing the conflict.

There is also another factor the West tends to minimize: Iran is not isolated in the classical sense. It can rely on political, economic, and in some cases technical-military support from Russia and China. This does not mean Moscow and Beijing will openly go to war for Tehran, but it does mean the country is not devoid of strategic depth. And that alone is enough to make any hypothesis of rapid collapse far more complicated.

A War of Attrition and the Munitions Factor

On the military level, the central question is not only who strikes better, but who can endure longer. Contemporary wars, even when they begin as high-intensity campaigns, often turn into contests of industrial, logistical, and missile-for-missile endurance. And here the knot is simple: how many offensive vectors can Tehran still employ, and how much defensive ammunition can Israel and, indirectly, the United States still sustain?

If Iran retains a substantial ballistic arsenal and has at least partially restored its production capabilities, then the conflict cannot be measured only by the precision of the first raids, but by the duration of the exchange. To neutralize a high volume of missiles requires interceptors in much greater numbers, an efficient integrated defense network, and stockpiles that cannot be assumed to be infinite. This is the mathematics of war, even more than its rhetoric.

That is why a military campaign can quickly become a test of exhaustion. If defenses become saturated, if costs rise, if losses strike symbolic or strategic targets, then even technological superiority can lose its aura of invincibility. And with it goes the political credibility of those who have turned it into an instrument of pressure.

The Strategic Lesson Everyone Can See

There is, finally, a lesson this war is already delivering to the rest of the world, whatever its future evolution may be: a state perceived as lacking credible strategic deterrence remains exposed. A state equipped with nuclear deterrence, by contrast, is treated with far greater caution. It is an uncomfortable conclusion, but one that is difficult to contest historically.

If Tehran already possessed an operational nuclear weapon, the threshold of political and military risk for anyone wishing to strike it would be vastly higher. This does not mean justifying proliferation. It means acknowledging the real mechanism of international force: law carries little weight when a credible capacity for deterrence is absent.

And this is precisely where the West risks achieving the opposite of what it proclaims. An action designed to weaken Iran and prevent its strategic rise may push many actors to conclude that only ultimate deterrence guarantees survival. That would be the final paradox: a war launched in the name of security producing more insecurity, more arms racing, and less order.

The Choice Europe Keeps Postponing

The real scandal, then, is not only the latest American and Israeli military initiative. The real scandal is European passivity. We remain trapped in an increasingly asymmetrical relationship in which we pay the price of crises without determining their objectives. We continue to call protection what often resembles constraint. We continue to confuse loyalty with subordination.

For Europe, and for Italy in particular, the question is not whether to choose Tehran over Washington or Jerusalem. The question is whether to choose itself at last. That means defending its energy, commercial, and strategic interests with realism. It means freeing itself from the reflex of political dependency. It means understanding that an allied power can, in practice, act against our interests.

Freeing ourselves from the liberators does not mean severing all ties with the United States. It means ceasing to accept as natural a condition of strategic inferiority. It means once again thinking as historical actors, not as disciplined spectators. Because if Europe continues to let itself be dragged into wars conceived elsewhere, decided elsewhere, and paid for here, then the problem will no longer be only the Iranian crisis. It will be our final renunciation of existing as a political power.