– Europa Press/Contact/Cécilia Fabiano
MADRID, December 7 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto warned on Saturday that the recent US national security strategy involves a radical change in relations between Washington and Brussels, as well as the accelerated end of defense guarantees granted after 1945, and urged Europe to strengthen its technological, economic and military autonomy.
Crosetto stressed that “for three years, during meetings and private ministerial talks”, it has been considered a now codified reality, that “the relationship with the European Union will change and the defense guarantees after 1945 will quickly expire”. According to him, this change is mainly due to the low strategic value of the EU in the context of the “increasingly difficult, complex and tough” competition that the United States has with China.
“Trump has simply made it clear that the EU is of little or no use to him in this competition. Because it does not have particularly important or useful natural resources. Because it is losing the competition when it comes to innovation and technology. Because it has no military power,” he said in a statement posted on social media.
In this sense, the Italian minister indicated that he hoped that the White House would grant a margin of two or three additional years to make these changes, but that the transition – a process he described as “irreversible” – occurred more quickly than expected, following the arrival of Donald Trump.
Among the reasons given, Crosetto also underlined that, faced with new global players, Europe appears “small, slow and old”.
However, the minister insisted that the central “problem” is not Europe itself, but the center of American strategy, whose sole objective is to “strengthen the United States in its competition with China.”
It is, he judged, a “pragmatic approach, without sentimentality or attachments, utilitarian and oriented exclusively towards economic and technological supremacy in the years to come, because that means supremacy in this century”.
In this context, Crosetto argued that small countries, like Italy, must make their own strategic decisions to protect their resources, technology, economy and wealth. “Not to exercise supremacy over anyone, but to secure our future,” he said.
Furthermore, he recalled that Europe has depended for decades on the security provided “free” by the United States and that it is now necessary to strengthen bilateral alliances in other regions – Africa, Gulf, Asia, South America and Australia – to guarantee economic, energy and strategic security.
Thus, the Italian Defense official defended the need for a pragmatic, rapid and coordinated European approach at European level. “The more of us there are, the stronger our defense will be and the less expensive it will be,” he argued before emphasizing that global changes are of paramount importance and require Europe to “see, understand and steer the ship, like at sea during a storm”.
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