Attacker and attacked

Just as I was writing about the new US strategy (not significantly out of line with the old one, but stripped of a fair amount of saccharine hypocrisy), Trump decided to implement it, which forces me to delve further. I'll just share a thought with you about our friend the EU Duck, who, poor thing, has found himself in a bind (and with him, his fifth columns). Applying the "aggressor-attacked" rhetoric in this case seems complex to me (regardless of whether one is right or wrong). Moreover, anyone here who would appeal to an unborn (rather than defunct) international law based on the principle of self-determination would have to reject four decades of unionist propaganda based on the belief that Italians were incapable of governing themselves and therefore needed external constraints.

Will those who seized Russian assets now seize US ones, many are wondering? Incidentally, Claudio has been wondering this for months…

But more generally, how will those who for years have called for external constraints for Italy deplore them for Venezuela, a country decidedly less functional and efficient than ours?

In the end, we too have had our "regina changes" in the name of the international order (of the markets), albeit much less dramatic and bloody. But the first problem with principles is this: either you apply them or you don't; the second is that to apply them, you need the strength to do so.

The EU will never have this strength, and the fault lies not with our "sovereignty", but with its hypocrisy.

This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2026/01/aggressore-e-aggredito.html on Mon, 05 Jan 2026 08:58:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.