by Giulio Meotti
There is only a deep bitterness to feel about the state of what the great writer Maurice Dantec called “Zeropa.” And as often happens, it is an Italian video that reminds us of it.
Italy’s so-called “head of diplomacy” Antonio Tajani writes:
“The Italian merchant ship ‘Grande Torino,’ of the Grimaldi group, just hours after the signing of the agreement between the USA and Iran, was among the first to cross the Strait of Hormuz. It is now sailing toward the East. A success for Italian diplomacy. Great news for the resumption of commercial traffic and especially for all the sailors on board and their families in Italy.”
Tajani’s video looks like it came straight out of my book Titanic Europe: an Iranian official grants permission to an Italian ship to pass through a strait over which Tehran has no legal claim, and the Italian captain thanks him in broken English.
It’s not that I expected Italian frigates to be sent to reopen Hormuz, but why publish a video like this?
Then Giorgia Meloni telling Donald Trump to be “tougher on the enemies of the West” is even funnier than Tajani posting the Grimaldi ship begging Tehran for passage through Hormuz.
What is Meloni talking about?
There is a magnificent saying by Hilaire Belloc: “Always keep a-hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse.”
Between Trump’s defeat in Iran and European mediocrity, there is little to be cheerful about.
“The Islamic Republic wishes the Italian company every success,” it ironically comments in the meantime.
We have delegitimized and boycotted this war by pinning it not on the West but on Trump and Bibi Netanyahu – bogeymen whose defeat gives many Westerners a perverse physical pleasure.
Since 1979, theocratic Iran has held half the world hostage, and now the knights of Allah are jumping down from their trucks to demand the ransom of dhimmitude.
Once upon a time – as Carl Schmitt teaches – European powers imposed free passage on the seas with warships and treaties written with cannon fire. Today an Italian merchant ship sails through Hormuz and the Farnesina thanks those who, until a few hours earlier, could close it at will.
If this is not Western decline, it is very close to it.
And the “guaranteed permission” is the perfect metaphor for a Europe that begs.
“Braaaavo,” the liar Emmanuel Macron was meanwhile saying to Trump after he signed the agreement with Iran under the ceilings of Versailles – the lavish setting of the palace that embodied the apogee of a grandeur long gone.
Another grotesque video: the French president, who lives outside history in the palace of kings, applauds a treaty with the Islamic Republic that Paris helped create in 1979 by launching Ayatollah Khomeini.
Despite the overwhelming military superiority of the West, the real weakness has once again shown itself in that sociocultural apparatus called “public opinion,” made up of newspapers, television, bureaucracies, the UN, and public squares. We peaceful Westerners – are we still willing to acknowledge the existence of an enemy?
Cowardly France no longer hides its hostility (or is it jealousy of its selling power) towards Israel.
At Eurosatory, the military fair in Paris, barriers were erected around the stands of Israeli defense companies, even though those companies complied with French restrictions requiring Israeli firms to display only defensive weapon systems.
Those of China, Turkey, and other countries are of course on full display.
Victory against Iran seemed closer than ever. After the blows inflicted first in June 2025 and then in March of this year, Iran was in ruins: its military infrastructure destroyed, the senior command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps eliminated, the Supreme Leader killed. Iran had lost two-thirds of its missile and drone production capacity, hundreds of launchers, and 250 air defense systems. Economic damage reached $140-150 billion. Major factories, power plants, and bridges were destroyed. Over 85% of Iranian petrochemical exports had been disabled.
How unexpected was Trump’s decision? Not very, at least for me.
Israeli scholar Meir Javedanfar, born in Iran, tells the Wall Street Journal that in Tehran they are “euphoric.”
Not only has the Islamic regime survived, but it has managed to impose its own conditions on the most powerful nation in the world and humiliate it, forcing the United States to pay in the form of sanctions relief and asset unfreezing.
Dozens of geopolitical analyses of the war can be read, but the best is the one by Algerian-French novelist Kamel Daoud, who places it after the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, Bin Laden’s 9/11, and Sinwar’s October 7.
Now the grandson of Khomeini said it: “The Great Jihad begins today.”
October 7 was not a conventional war between two recognizable armies. It was a deliberate massacre of civilians. Families were exterminated in their homes. Children were murdered. Women were raped. Elderly people were kidnapped. Hundreds of hostages were dragged into the tunnels of Gaza. No state in the world would have accepted such an attack without reacting. No democratic government would have survived politically without a response.
But the West demands of Israel what it demands of no other nation: that it wage a war without war, neutralize its enemies without fighting them, eliminate an armed organization without touching the human environment in which it deliberately chose to embed itself.
The courage of the small Jewish state, which wants to annihilate the very terrorists ready for war with Zeropa, highlights the Pétainization of Europe – ready for every compromise with totalitarian and conquering Islam, even to beg for maritime passage with a diplomatic video to prove it.
I have just returned to the Venice Ghetto: five synagogues, art shops, a few kosher restaurants, a retirement home, and more police than tourists in an area no larger than two soccer fields. There was wonderful peace and serenity, broken only by a few wise men chanting.
I thought again about the fact that I will never understand the hatred the West feels for this small Jewish people who have only enriched our civilization, yet are destined to play the role of eternal scapegoat.
There is little to celebrate when the West comes out defeated.