Vox Clamantis in Deserto?

Mario Draghi’s latest intervention, this time from Washington, offers a crystal-clear analysis of globalization, the great betrayed promises of the post-1989 world, and what should be done today by far-sighted and courageous political leaders.

Draghi is blunt, speaking of a confused world where no one has the strength and ability to build solutions to the open challenges, from the invasion of Ukraine, to the destabilization of the Middle East, to the dire consequences of the Red Sea situation.

In this world, which is not what we would have expected after ’89, no one can go it alone, and the new challenges – on climate, income disparity, inequalities – require, according to Draghi, “a fiscal policy called to increase public investments to meet the range of new investment needs.”

And so it goes for security and defense. And I add, on immigration and artificial intelligence.

This sort of political manifesto is an unequivocal call to Europe. And the risk of Trump becoming President of the United States of America again, with his declared isolationism, makes this call a categorical imperative.

Will it remain a voice crying out in the desert, or will there be interlocutors capable of grasping and relaunching these challenges?

The European electoral arena would be the right place to clash and meet with genuine passion on these issues.

What Draghi’s speech evokes is the sense of the inevitability of these choices, lest there be a historic decline of the European project.

It should be clear that it is no longer the time for mediations and downward compromises if Europe does not intend to be overwhelmed by a headless, ungoverned globalization gone mad.