Italy Promises Full Support for Ukraine?
In yesterday’s “News Review” program on Press TV (Iran), I was given the opportunity to comment on several new key developments in the Russia-Ukraine war: Ukraine’s attack the day before on Lugansk city (Donbas) using the Shadow Storm cruise missiles newly delivered from Britain; the warm reception given to Zelensky yesterday on his visit to Rome and his talks with Prime Minister Meloni; and the 10-point peace plan which Zelensky has been presenting to European leaders in a bid to ensure further support for his regime.
I am most appreciative to my hosts on Press TV for allowing me to set out my basic thoughts on each of these questions, although, of course, in the time pressure of such ‘on air’ discussions you never can flesh out ideas fully. I use this platform to round out my remarks. I also note that I was speaking from St Petersburg, not Brussels, since this bears on what I had to say about the strong Italian commercial presence around me.
I have already commented a day ago on how the delivery of the Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Kiev by Britain sets the stage for a Russian attack on Britain itself, since the country has crossed into co-belligerent status and is clearly waging war on Russia. That the USA stands behind Britain, and that Britain is the US proxy is obvious as day, but for strategic reasons it is in Russia’s interest to limit any immediate response to the jackal and not to go after the lion. The jackal is not much loved on the Continent, and so a strike against Britain may well take place without anyone invoking NATO’s Article 5 of one for all and all for one.
Now I want to address the title issue of yesterday’s News Review program to which I have added a question mark. I also am obliged to explain here my speaking of the "stupid Germans" and of the "pragmatic Italians" as regards maintaining or cutting off all commercial ties with Russia.
Of course, I did not mean to be insulting to one side and flattering to the other. There is always a reason for everything, and to my mind the reason for Germans' "stupidity" on Russia is the draconian censorship in place against all nonconforming reporting about the war. But that goes back to the generalized McCarthyism in Germany and denunciations of so-called Putinversteher, meaning anyone who saw another side to the story on Russia, that I remarked upon in essays going back 5 or 6 years.
The brainwashing of Germany did not happen overnight. And then there is the specific German tradition of idealism that goes back a couple of centuries. German self-righteousness was marginalized politically for more than 50 years following the country’s defeat in WWII under an official policy of remorse for the horrors the country perpetrated domestically and across Europe under Adolf Hitler.
By the turn of the new millennium, however, a younger generation of Germans was saying the time had come to leave behind collective guilt over the misdeeds of their grandparents and to move on and assume the place among nations that their country’s economic strength merited. This new movement in turn evolved into the ‘holier than thou’ posture of the Greens and other German political streams which translates into excoriation of Putin’s Russia for its war of aggression in Ukraine and alleged war crimes.
Against this tidal wave of moral outrage among their compatriots, there is arguably little that German industrialists and even the Mittelstand can do publicly. I mention the Mittelstand, because they have been the backbone of the German economic miracle and yet these family businesses of middle and small size are the ones least able to escape the financial pain of the sanctions policies on Russia. Unlike Germany’s biggest corporations, they lack the human and financial resources to close down factories and move to America as Bayer Leverkusen is doing.
Turning to Italy, we see a very different story. As my hosts on Press TV pointed out, recent polls indicate that more than 50% of the population opposes further military aid to Ukraine. This is so because unlike Germany and France, Italy’s media scene is more open, less controlled. And this relative freedom has an explanation: namely the strength of populist parties and political leaders who oppose the foreign and domestic policies written in Brussels and promoted within Italy by the traditional parties. In this regard it pays to mention the Salvini faction, the Berlusconi faction and even Georgia Meloni herself, who long campaigned as an anti-Brussels politician.
What I see in Italy is precisely the same divisions and importance of populism that make the USA arguably the best protector of freedom of speech within the Western World that Washington leads. Why? For this we have to thank Donald Trump, who from the beginning of his presidency said from the office of the President things about NATO, about other Western leaders that would have brought down the FBI on the heads of ordinary citizens like myself had we said them before Trump did. I say emphatically that it was Trump who saved American democracy, not America’s own self-righteous Left and its iconic publications like The Nation, which was once a bastion of human rights defenders but is now just another promoter of domestic repression. But this is a subject for separate discussion.
I close this explanatory note to my remarks on Press TV yesterday with a few words about Italian “pragmatism” and what that means for commercial relations with Russia.
For all of its economic heft, Italy is less resilient than Germany financially and commercially. Italian businessmen placed great hopes on trade with Russia from the moment the market opened up in the 1990s. Of course, Italians had been leaders in trade with Russia during Soviet times, and their achievement in profiting from the Soviet market for automobiles by way of the Togliatti factory of FIAT was the tip of the iceberg. Now the new, free and market oriented Russian Federation presented still greater opportunities for small and medium sized Italian firms and they jumped into the fray.
As I remarked in the interview yesterday, here in Petersburg I see a strong Italian presence that by its nature is not done hands-off, via parallel trading through Belarus, Dubai, Kazakhstan or other exotic routes. No, by its nature it has to be directed from Italy by the producers. This is surely the case of the “Wines of Italy Week” at my nearby Perekryostok supermarket. This is a nationwide store chain that can offer such a promotion only if it has a very large assured supply and is not chasing after small lots of product in third countries engaging in parallel trade.
When I visit stores selling home electrical goods and electronics, and I will write about this in a few days in what will be my Petersburg Travel Notes – Part III, I see in mass consumer distributors white goods produced by Italian concerns.
An oil and gas giant like ENI has to submit to government orders on breaking contracts with Russia. But Italy’s small and medium sized companies are doing nothing of the kind.
All of which leads me to ask, how long Giorgia Meloni will be able to honor her promises of substantial and unlimited deliveries of arms and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
Italy promises full support for Ukraine | Urmedium