The Great Sellout begins with a familiar scene: she bows, smiles, offers gifts. The vassal’s ritual repeats unchanged through centuries, except this time the one kneeling isn’t a medieval lord but the prime minister of what was once the world’s seventh industrial power. Giorgia Meloni flies to Washington, and with her plummets the illusion of an Italy capable of self-determination on the international stage.
This pilgrimage to the White House unfolds as a spectacle of voluntary humiliation deserving more indignation than it stirs in Italy’s collective torpor. The great sellout continues as Trump freezes Europe with devastating tariff threats, and our response? We buy more American gas. We purchase more American weapons. We wage diplomatic war against China. All rigorously as ordered by our overseas master.
And the Italians? Silent. Consenting in their silence. Complicit.
THE PRICE OF SUBSERVIENCE
The script for this Washington visit comes written in the indelible ink of subordination. Meloni’s Italy doesn’t negotiate or bargain—it simply obeys. A prime minister who boasts of her patriotism arrives at the White House bearing an offer reeking of capitulation: opening the coffers of an already economically agonizing country to purchase more American liquefied natural gas—the same gas costing three times Russian prices, devastating our businesses’ competitiveness.
Not satisfied, she promises to further increase military spending to buy American-made weapons. A double humiliation for an Italy already prostrated by cyclical economic crises, galloping inflation, and wages frozen in the last century.
But the farce doesn’t end here. American unease regarding Italy-China relations immediately becomes an executive order for the Prime Minister’s office. The partnership agreement signed just months ago now faces suspicion—not from Italy, mind you, but from Americans. And that’s enough for it to automatically become problematic for us too.
THE EUROPE THAT NO LONGER EXISTS
In this tragedy, Europe plays the role of distinguished corpse. A continent that could have been a protagonist in world history reduced to a Greek chorus powerlessly commenting on decisions made elsewhere. The European Union, conceived as a project of peace and strategic autonomy, has transformed into a NATO military appendage, a logistical platform for confrontation with Russia and China.
Where have the founding fathers who dreamed of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals gone? Replaced by technocrats fantasizing about “completely unrealistic and paranoid” Russian invasions to justify a mad arms race. A warmongering narrative serving only to feed the transatlantic military industry’s profits.
While the US builds commercial walls against us with tariffs, we construct diplomatic walls against potential strategic partners. China—a power that, unlike others, has never bombed beyond its borders—gets painted as an existential enemy of the West. A strategic absurdity condemning the European economy to programmed decline.
THE ITALIANS: BETWEEN INDIFFERENCE AND COMPLICITY
The most tragic part of this comedy is the deafening silence of the Italian population. Once a people of navigators, poets, and critical thinkers, today an amorphous mass of passive spectators watching the dissolution of their economic sovereignty like a television drama.
The mainstream press, reduced to a megaphone for others’ interests, portrays Meloni’s visit as a diplomatic triumph, hiding the reality of a nation gradually stripped of its ability to determine its own destiny. Opposition parties, with rare exceptions, seem incapable of articulating a credible alternative to this model of Atlantic vassalage.
THE CLASSICAL DECLINE
Like ancient Greece described by historians, Europe experiences its classical crisis: mediocre elites, concerned only with immediate survival, leading states unable to respond to epochal challenges. The difference? While Athens took centuries to decline, Europe accelerates toward geopolitical irrelevance.
The Meloni government, far from being the sovereignty bulwark it wants us to believe, simply accelerates this process of economic colonization. Witnesses to The Great Sellout can count its progress: for every American LNG tanker arriving at our ports, for every fighter bomber purchased with Italian taxpayer money, a piece of our autonomy disappears.
And we, 21st-century Italians, witness this great sellout with the same passivity with which our ancestors watched circus games. Panem et circenses—the formula remains unchanged across millennia.
It’s time to think with our own minds again, to demand autonomous foreign policy, to rebuild a Europe that truly stands as a historical subject rather than an object of others’ strategies. The Great Sellout can still be reversed, but only through collective awakening and action. Otherwise, let’s prepare for a long, inglorious agony as a province of the empire.