From the Baltic skies to the Sicilian narrows, Rome confronts a new security bill — and a fading illusion that peace can be outsourced.

Italy did not hear the sirens. There was no general mobilization, no blackout drills, no columns of conscripts on the autostrade. Yet the country wakes this week to a stark reality: the peace many assumed was permanent now depends on choices we delayed for three decades. NATO’s emergency move to reinforce its eastern flank after a wave of Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace is more than a border operation; it is a mirror held up to the Alliance. The reflection is uncomfortable for Italy: we have tried to outsource risk while insourcing prosperity.

Eighty years ago the logic ran the other way. Italy “won” the peace because it lost the war. The Germany of 1945 would have reduced us to a disciplined periphery; the United States, our former enemy, offered security, capital and a path back to dignity. For three generations that bargain held. The Mediterranean felt manageable, crises were kept at a distance, and prosperity softened our edges. The contract was simple: Washington would guarantee the perimeter if Europe kept its ledger tidy and its ambitions modest.

That contract is being rewritten in real time. At June’s NATO summit in The Hague, allies endorsed a far more demanding investment path: a five‑percent of GDP commitment to “defence and security,” divided between core military spending and the wider resilience that keeps societies and supply chains running. The politics behind the number are blunt: a war in Ukraine that has erased the fiction that geography protects the continent; eastern allies who have moved first and furthest; and a Washington that now measures allies by the capabilities they field, not the communiqués they sign.

The new posture is not abstract. On Friday evening, an allied mission dubbed “Eastern Sentry” began shifting fighter jets, air‑defence units and logistics nodes to buttress NATO’s line from the Baltics to the Black Sea after drones crossed into Poland. The most visible movements are in the northeast, but many of the arteries that feed the effort run through Italy. Aviano’s 31st Fighter Wing acts as a shuttle for deterrence; Sigonella’s long‑endurance drones have turned Sicily into a surveillance anchor that ties the Black Sea to the Baltic; tankers and transports trace the Adriatic as if it were a military highway.

Italy is also on the front line by choice. On 1 August the Air Force assumed command of NATO’s Baltic Air Policing rotation from Ämari, Estonia, with F‑35A stealth fighters—our second time flying fifth‑generation aircraft in that mission. Just days earlier, Italian Eurofighters had wrapped up an enhanced air‑policing tour in Romania. These are not ceremonial sorties. They intercept, escort and signal resolve, sometimes several times a day. They also expose a simple truth: our credibility in Brussels and Washington now hangs on readiness rates and sortie counts, not rhetoric.

The map has rotated, but the Mediterranean has not vanished. If the eastern flank is the tripwire, the southern flank is the fuse. Migration pressure, energy routes, critical undersea infrastructure and the ambitions of regional powers collide in seas we once called mare nostrum. Grain ships and gas tankers pass under Italian eyes; so do Russian warships and intelligence vessels. The same network that supports fighter patrols over Estonia protects data cables off Sicily and escorts cargo through the Bosporus and the Suez approaches.

Energy explains part of the adjustment. In the comfortable years, cheap Russian gas bought room in our budgets. Since 2022 Italy has scrambled to re‑route supplies—more Algeria, more LNG, more Azerbaijan via the TAP pipeline—at a price measured in public spending and industrial margins. Europe’s stop‑start effort to end Russian imports has been messy, with periodic spikes in LNG purchases and awkward loopholes. The direction of travel is clear; the bill is, too. Strategic autonomy at the plug begins with choices that are slower, dearer and, for a time, politically unpopular.

All roads lead back to money—and to time. Meeting the new NATO benchmark will be punishing without reform. Debt leaves little slack, growth is stubborn, and a generational backlog in procurement and maintenance will not vanish with a single budget law. Creative accounting—classifying strategic infrastructure as “defence‑relevant,” for instance—may buy political space but not capability. A bridge can move troops more quickly; it will not intercept a hypersonic glide vehicle, reload an air‑defence battery or keep an F‑35 fleet mission‑capable through a long crisis.

A sober plan would start with readiness before glitter. The most valuable euro is the one that turns a grounded aircraft into a flying one and a paper battalion into a unit that can deploy on thirty days’ notice. Munitions and sustainment come next. Deterrence in 2025 is a throughput problem: fuel, air‑to‑air missiles, medium‑range air defence, long‑range fires, spare parts and the crews to move them. Italy’s industrial base has pockets of excellence—from avionics and space to helicopters and shipbuilding—but it needs predictable orders, export agility and deepening Franco‑German‑Italian cooperation to scale.

Europe’s collective effort matters just as much. Joint procurement can shave costs and create depth, but only if timelines are ruthless and standards common. The eastern allies have set a pace that the rest of Europe can no longer ignore. Poland’s build‑up, the Baltics’ layered air defence, the Nordics’ integration with NATO’s command structure—these are not photo opportunities. They are a scoreboard. Italy’s place on it will be defined by what we field and how often it is available, not by how beautifully we describe our ambitions.

The temptation in Rome is to pick a patron rather than a plan. One option is German delegation—the reflex to follow Berlin’s lead even as Germany wrestles to translate its Zeitenwende into hard power. Another is a soft neutralism dressed up as “European strategic autonomy,” in which we act as if Europe can be post‑American before it is pre‑Russian. Neither offers what Italy needs: credible deterrence at the eastern tripwire and resilient governance in the southern fuse. Leadership here is participation that hurts a little: budgets re‑weighted to readiness, ministers judged by outputs, and a calendar that moves in months, not parliaments.

And then there is America—the former enemy turned guarantor. The bargain was never sentimental. Italians accepted U.S. pressure and permanent bases because the alternative was worse. That calculus still holds. But a more transactional Washington will count aircraft that fly, ships that sail and brigades that deploy. Bases are not IOUs; they are platforms that must be matched by national capability. The allies that put steel on the line shape the strategy. The allies that talk about strategy while postponing procurement discover that plans are made for them, not with them.

Domestic politics runs through everything. Voters remain wary of distant wars and allergic to austerity. If “five percent” becomes a slogan rather than a strategy, it will fail. The only durable way to carry the country is ruthless transparency about trade‑offs, visible improvements in readiness and a clear division of labour: industry commits to timelines, the government to multi‑year funding, the services to measurable outputs. The story must be honest: peace now has conditions, and meeting them is cheaper than learning those conditions the hard way.

None of this means war is inevitable. It means that the price of keeping the peace has risen, and delay is a luxury. In 1945 Italy found peace because defeat forced clarity. In 2025 we risk losing peace because comfort fogs our vision. The choice is not east versus south, guns versus butter, America versus Europe. It is between doing enough, soon enough, to make crisis diplomacy credible—and doing little, and discovering that decisions are made for us. The eastern front of NATO is not an abstraction. It is the ledger where Italy’s promises are tallied.

A new Italian realism would start from three recognitions. First, geography is both destiny and network: what flies over Estonia, refuels over the Adriatic and lands in Poland is one mission; what sails through Messina under a satellite’s gaze is another face of the same mission. Second, prosperity is downstream of security; investors do not bet on paralysed alliances. Third, deterrence is a team sport with a scoreboard. Allies who spend, train and show up shape the playbook. Those who delay get assigned the bench. We did not choose this test, but we have seen its outline before. If we accept it now, the sirens may stay silent—and the next three generations can enjoy a peace co‑signed by Rome rather than granted on credit by Uncle Sam.