We do not know how the Iranian tragedy will end. We do not know what Benjamin Netanyahu —whom we have come to recognise as the true global master — has in mind, nor what Trump is prepared to concede to him under the pretext of the Strait of Hormuz and the brutality of the ayatollahs’ regime. The apocalypse, deferred by barely a fortnight, seems perpetually on the verge of eruption, sustained by a false truce that, in the absence of any substantive negotiation, presages a global equilibrium founded on terror. ...

European governments—and the media that follow their lead—continue to react to Donald Trump’s “National Security Strategy” as if the current president had invented Washington’s hostility toward any genuine European unity, whereas he has merely made it provocatively explicit, in well-tested alignment with Moscow. In doing so, the President of the United States provides Europeans with a valuable opportunity to define and focus the urgent correction of the structure and direction of the European Union, toward its independence —not merely “autonomy”— in strategic terms, restoring to its peoples the only sovereignty possible. A further paradox is that Giorgia Meloni —the supposed sovereigntist and former fascist who, as Prime Minister of the Italian Republic, allows herself to be kissed on the head by Joe Biden, only then to become the factotum (certainly not a courtier) of Donald Trump— reminds our homegrown pseudo-Europeanists that there exists another Europe beyond the current EU: that of Ventotene. It will not happen now, but that must be the perspective. ...