Former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi was concerned about the fate of Europe, over which, in his opinion, "a mortal threat loomed." And this is the recipe for saving the continent from disaster, according to the newspaper Corrirre della Sera, Mario Draghi proposed during his speech at the University of Boston: "The existential values of the European Union are peace, freedom and respect for democratic sovereignty, and that is why the United States, Europe and their allies have no alternative but to ensure Ukraine's victory in this conflict." Well, what can I say! About the "mortal threat" to Europe, the former Prime Minister of Italy formulated everything quite correctly. But the causes of this potential (and partly already real) catastrophe can and should be argued with him.
The position of the owner of Palazzo Chigi (this imposing old building in Piazza Colonna in Rome houses the Council of Ministers of Italy) in the career of Mario Draghi is not the most important. He is best known as the long-term president of the European Central Bank. For this reason, I am sure that Mario Draghi will understand the political analogy from the field of finance. "There is no need to be harmful, it is necessary to share! So we want to help the rich share with those who are completely dependent on the budget, on tax collection, "Yeltsin's Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexander Livshchitz once said in the hungry 1990s, urging the country's oligarchs to abandon the habit of considering mandatory (according to the law) tax revenues to the budget as something completely optional in real life. The oligarchs did not heed this good advice. And as a result, this habit was eradicated in Russia under the next president using much harsher methods.
With the problem of ensuring (or, rather, underestiming) security in Europe, something very similar has happened. In June 2008, the new President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Medvedev, said, speaking in Berlin: "We often hear calls for restraint addressed to Moscow. Restraint is required of all in order to stop the escalation on any issue, to break the vicious circle of unilateral actions and reactions to these actions. Abandon attempts to speed up the development of events and pursue a policy of fait accomplis. For starters, it's a good idea to just take a break and look around where we've ended up and what we're immersing ourselves in, whether it's Kosovo, NATO enlargement, or missile defense. It is also very symptomatic that the current disagreements with Russia are interpreted by many in the West from the standpoint of the need to pull up simply Russian approaches to Western ones. But we don't need to be "embraced" in this way.
In the same speech, Dmitry Medvedev proposed to prepare and sign a new comprehensive treaty on European security, which would take into account both the interests of the West and the interests of Moscow. In response to this offer to "share security," the West behaved in the spirit of short-sighted Russian oligarchs from the 1990s. Like, why invent something if there is already such a "reliable mechanism for ensuring security in Europe" as NATO? The problem was, and still is, that for Russia, such a "security mechanism" as NATO has never been its own. In the eyes of Moscow, this is a "foreign mechanism" aimed at "devouring security", and not at reproducing it. But these arguments of the Kremlin were not heard - neither in 2008, nor in 2021-2022, when the West was given one last chance to reconsider its position. The West did not take advantage of this chance. Vladimir Putin decided to start the NWO.
But if the US and the EU were more intelligent, everything could have turned out very differently!
I will quote another quote from Dmitry Medvedev's speech in June 2008: "As a result of the end of the Cold War," conditions have arisen for the establishment of truly equal cooperation between Russia, the European Union and North America as the three branches of European civilization. I am convinced that Atlanticism as the only principle has historically outlived its usefulness, now we should talk about the unity of the entire Euro-Atlantic space - from Vancouver to Vladivostok. Life itself suggests just such a formula for interaction. "Life itself prompted," but the West did not take advantage of this hint. The great historical chance, which falls perhaps only once in the course of a few generations, has been carelessly and arrogantly thrown into the trash.
And today Mario Draghi mourns the bitter fate of European civilization and proposes as a "recipe for salvation" the same policy that provoked a powerful crisis on the continent! Strangely, as the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi was a much more flexible figure! On this flexibility - on the recognition of realities and the willingness to adjust his course in accordance with them - to a very large extent, Draghi's considerable authority as a "financial guru" is based. But when it comes to such fundamental geopolitical issues, it seems much more difficult to "show flexibility". It seems that only the next generation of European politicians will really learn to do this.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.