Crosetto’s floating cabaret

Guido Crosetto, Italy’s cack-handed Defense Minister, has managed to outdo himself, even by the farcical standards of Italian politics, where buffoonery is not a bug but the system’s defining feature. Dispatching the Virginio Fasan—a FREMM multipurpose frigate bristling with Aster missiles, torpedo tubes, and anti-submarine sensors—sent under the pretext of rescuing the Global Sumud Flotilla, a self-appointed armada that exists more in press conferences than in maritime law, sets a new bar.

That alone would be comic enough, but Crosetto insists it is not a military mission. One imagines him explaining that a billion-euro warship is merely a humanitarian lifeboat with a vertical-launch system attached to the deck as decoration. And yet it comes across as the same strategic logic of bringing a tank to a bake sale and calling it an oven.

Probe further, and the absurdities only deepen. The flotilla itself, already a parody of international law, split before leaving port: its Tunisian coordinators expelled a queer activist in the name of “Muslim values.” That is, Mohammedan solidarity—provided it comes with heterosexual certification. This is the moral cargo Crosetto has chosen to dignify with NATO combat hardware.

And so the frigate does not escort the flotilla; the flotilla escorts the frigate—dragging it into the cabaret of Italian politics. The activists provide the pantomime, Israel is cast as the eternal villain, and Crosetto lumbers onto the stage like a bureaucratic Captain Ahab, harpooning Zionism instead of whales. What emerges is not strategy but a tragic caricature, played out with live ammunition.

Once, Italy exported opera. Now it stages vaudeville: an arms dealer recast as a peace apostle, or rather an anti-Zionist moralist brandishing torpedoes, dispatches a warship to chaperone a potemkin flotilla that does not legally exist. What passes for foreign policy in Rome these days is not strategy but slapstick—starring a frigate in search of a navy, and a minister in search of a clue.