The "strange defeat" of the West: reality and realism

+ The importance of Trieste in the NATO-Russia clash

Today I am providing my English translation of 2 articles. (All emphasis and footnotes mine in both).

The first one is a long article by Aurelien, first published in French on Reseau International on Friday 20th December 2024 and then in Italian on ComeDonChisciotte.org (CDC) on Monday 23rd December 2024.

The "strange defeat" of the West: reality and realism

I have already written on several occasions about the lack of realism with which the West usually approaches the ongoing crisis in and around Ukraine, and the almost cloying dissociation from the real world it displays in its words and actions. However, as the situation deteriorates and Russian forces advance everywhere, there is no evidence that the West is any more grounded in reality in its understanding, and it is highly likely that it will learn nothing and continue to live in its alternative construction of reality until it is forcibly expelled.

It is true that some bold avant-garde thinkers in the West are beginning to question the need for negotiations, albeit on Western terms. They are beginning to accept that perhaps some of the Ukrainian territory of 1991 will have to be considered lost, even if only in the short term. Perhaps, they wonder, a Korean-style demilitarised zone will be established, guaranteed by neutral troops, until Ukraine can be rebuilt to resume the offensive. And then they look at the map of Russian advances, look at the size and power of the two armies, look at the size and readiness of NATO forces, and sink into despair.

But not really: forget that last sentence. They do not look, and if they did, they would not be able to understand what they see anyway. The “debate” (if you can call it that) in the West largely excludes the reality of life. It takes place at a high normative level, where certain facts and truths are simply assumed. The why of this and the consequences are the subject of the first part of this essay and then, since these topics are inherently complex, I will explain how to understand them as simply as possible.

Truffles and fanatics

Let us begin with some practical considerations of sociology and political psychology. The first is that politics is a classic example of the sunk cost phenomenon. The longer one persists in a course of action, however stupid, the less likely one is to change it. Changing course will be interpreted as an admission of error, and admitting error is the first step to losing power. In this case, the old defence (“personally, I've always had my doubts...”) does not hold up, given the gratuitously psychopathic terms in which Western leaders have spoken about Russia.

The second is the absence of an articulate alternative (“So, Prime Minister, what do you think we should do?”). The very fact that you do not understand the dynamics of a crisis means that you are powerless to propose a reasonable solution. It is better to stay on a sinking ship in the hope of being rescued than to jump blindly into the water. Maybe a miracle will happen.

The third is related to group dynamics, in this case the dynamics of nations. In a situation of fear and uncertainty like the one we are experiencing, solidarity ends up being seen as an end in itself, and no one wants to be accused of “weakening the West” or “strengthening Russia”. If one has to make a mistake, one might as well do it in the company of as many people as possible. There are huge obstacles to being the first to suggest that the situation could be rather bleak, and in any case, what do we propose instead? The chances of some thirty countries being able to agree on a different approach to the current one are practically nil, especially since the US, which could lead by example, is politically paralysed until perhaps next spring.

The fourth problem is isolation and groupthink. Everyone in your government, everyone you talk to in other governments, all the journalists and experts you meet tell you the same thing: Putin cannot win, Russia is suffering huge losses, we have to rebuild Ukraine, Putin is afraid of NATO, and so on. Everywhere you turn, you receive the same messages, and your staff writes the same messages for you to pass on to others. How can you not accept that all this is true? These factors are what we might call permanent political factors, common to any crisis. But there are also a number of specific factors at work in this particular crisis that seem obvious to me, but which I have not heard much about. Let us look at some of them.

Bad politicians

To begin with, the current generation of Western politicians is particularly incapable of understanding and handling high-level crises of any kind. The modern Western political class - the Party, as I call it - increasingly resembles the ruling party in a one-party state. In other words, the skills that lead to success are those of advancing within the Party apparatus itself: climbing to the top and stabbing rivals in the back. Even the management of a purely internal crisis - as we saw during Brexit or as we are currently seeing in France and Germany - is actually beyond their capabilities, with the possible exception of the ability to turn a crisis into a personal political advantage. The result is that they are completely overwhelmed by the Ukrainian crisis, which is of a scale and type that perhaps only occurs once every two generations. The fact that it is also a multilateral crisis means that it ideally requires advanced political management skills just to make sure things don't go south, and they don't even have them. In turn, the increasing use of “advisors” linked to the personal future of the politician in question means both that professional advice is increasingly excluded and that professional advisors are often selected and promoted because they are ready to give the advice politicians want to hear.

So far, all very general. But we are also facing a security crisis, and our political classes and their parasites have no idea how to handle such crises, or even how to understand them.

During the Cold War, governments regularly had to deal with security issues: they were often also domestic political issues. Security issues were also objectively important, as East and West looked at each other across a militarised border, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation always present. None of this is true today.

NATO summits are still held, of course, but until recently they were devoted to peacekeeping deployments, counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and the endless succession of new member additions and partnership initiatives. So far, no current leader of a NATO (or EU) country has had to take fundamental security decisions.

This is all the more regrettable because a security crisis is extremely complex and involves a whole range of levels, from the political to the military/tactical. And a security crisis is virtually impossible to manage at the multilateral level: the only comparable example I can think of is the Kosovo crisis in 1999, when a much smaller NATO ceased to function after the first week and almost collapsed completely. [Here the author probably refers to the so-called “Pristina Airport Incident”, when British Lieutenant General Mike Jackson and British Captain James Blunt refused to execute orders from NATO commander, US General Wesley Clark, to seize the airport, captured by the Russians, by force - for more info see this article].

I have already pointed out that NATO has no strategy for Ukraine, no real operational plan. All it has is a series of ad hoc initiatives, linked together by vague aspirations that bear no relation to real life and the hope that something will happen.

In reality, this is because no NATO member country is in a better situation: our current Western political leaders have never had to develop these capabilities. But it is actually even worse: not having developed these capabilities, not having advisors who have developed them, they cannot really understand what the Russians are doing, how and why they are doing it. Western leaders are like spectators who do not know the rules of a game of chess or go and try to figure out who is winning.

Western leaders are not expected to be military experts themselves. It is common to mock defence ministers who have no military experience, but this is a misunderstanding of how defence works in a democracy, and how democracy itself works.

Allow me to step into the shoes of a teacher to explain.

Governing?

Governments have policies at different levels. One of these is national security policy, which in turn forms the basis for more detailed policies in subordinate areas: in this case, defence. Traditionally, these policies are managed by ministries, headed by political figures or appointees, who have advisors and, in most cases, operational organisations to translate policy into concrete activities on the ground. In the case of the Ministry of Education, the operational units are the schools and universities. In the case of the Ministry of Defence, the operational units are the armed forces and specialised defence institutes. One would not expect a Minister of Defence to be a former soldier, any more than one would expect a Minister of Education to be a former teacher or, if you like, a Minister of Transport to be a former railwayman. The responsibility of a minister is to develop and implement policies within the broader strategic framework of the government and to manage the budget and programme for his or her area. It is therefore the responsibility of the political leadership - which normally includes the head of state or government - to define the strategic objective of any military operation and to define a situation (the “target end state”) in which this objective will have been achieved.

If this is not done, military planning and operations are useless, no matter how good the forces and destructive the weaponry, because you do not know what you are trying to do and therefore cannot tell whether you have done it. This, and not the lack of military knowledge, is the fundamental problem of today's Western political leaders.

Indeed, it would be better to call them “managers”, because they have no aspiration to lead. They are nothing more than MBA-educated wheeler-dealers and jokesters, for whom the concept of strategic goals in the true sense of the word is basically meaningless. Instead of real strategic goals, they have slogans and fanciful proposals. After all, it goes without saying that the strategic goals set by the government must be truly attainable, otherwise there is no point in pursuing them. They must also be clear enough to be communicated to the military, so that they can develop an operational plan to achieve the final goal. Furthermore, political leaders must define the constraints and requirements within which the military must operate. Since Western leaders and their advisors do not know how to do this, they cannot even understand what the Russians are doing.

Planning?

After that, of course, there is a need for a political-military level capable of operational planning and thus able to answer a series of questions such as: what military results will achieve the final political objective?

How can it be achieved? What forces will be needed? How should they be structured and equipped? How are political imperatives and constraints to be managed? Although these questions are generic and probably also apply to peacekeeping operations, they obviously apply with increasing force as operations become larger and more demanding.

And this is the essential problem. The war in Ukraine involves forces an order of magnitude larger than those sent into operations by any Western nation since 1945. In fact, it can be said that the only time forces of comparable size were deployed in Europe was between 1915 and 1918, and again in 1944-45. European armies certainly studied these campaigns, but over time they became historical examples, not something to draw applicable lessons from. And the planning from 1950 to 1990 envisaged a short defensive war that would probably be nuclear. One wonders if there is really anything in recent Western military history that can help today's commanders really understand what they are seeing.

In times of peace - in times of war

Nor do they have recent professional experience. It has also become fashionable to mock Western military commanders, but in many ways this is unfair. In peacetime, the role of senior military leaders is simply to prepare for war. There are also a thousand other issues concerning budgets, programmes, personnel matters, contracts, the future size and shape of the army, and many others. Senior military leaders must be able to understand all these issues and deal with political leaders, diplomats, civil servants and their counterparts in other governments, as well as Parliament and the media. It is obvious that in peacetime, one will not choose an army chief solely on the basis of his supposed combat skills if he is an aggressive individual who is always arguing with the minister.

That is why it is almost universal that military commanders are replaced en masse at the beginning of a war. Some commanders may turn out to be natural fighters and others may not. Large-scale personnel changes are therefore common because the task is very different: we have seen this with the Russian army since 2022. Similarly, a peacetime army needs time to adapt to war. The problem for Western experts is that they observe this process from afar, without having experienced it first-hand. Armies that are still only familiar with peacetime operational methods try to understand the activities of armies that have fully transitioned to war.

Finally, Western military specialists are limited by their experience. Imagine you are in charge of operations in a medium-sized western country. You joined the army in the 1990s, when the last senior officers who had lived through the Cold War were retiring. Your actual experience was limited to peacekeeping operations and a few deployments to Afghanistan. The largest unit you have ever commanded in an operation is a battalion (say 5-600 men) and the last time you were under fire you were a company commander. How can you reasonably expect to understand the mechanisms and complexities of manoeuvring armies of several hundred thousand men, along lines of contact hundreds of kilometres long, and to understand what the commanders involved do and how they think? Unconsciously you focus on the things you can understand, on the scale at which you can understand them. Inevitably you focus on the details - here destroyed tanks, there a new variant of artillery deployed - rather than the big picture.

Is there a Ukrainian strategy?

This seems to me to explain a number of things, not least the curiously episodic nature of Ukrainian initiatives. Some have clearly been prompted by the West, others by a very Westernised Ukrainian political class that thinks in Western terms. (Ironically, the military is probably more realistic and able to grasp the bigger picture). But there has been very little long-term strategic activity, or even thinking. Take the example of the attacks on the Crimean bridge. What exactly was their objective? From now on, answers like “send a message to Putin”, “complicate Russian logistics” or “improve morale at home” are no longer allowed. What I would like to know is what is expected in concrete terms. What are the tangible results of this “message”? Can you guarantee that it will be understood? Have you foreseen the possible reactions of the Russians and what will you do then? Suppose, once again, you complicate Russian logistics? What will be the direct result and how easy will it be for the Russians to circumvent the problem?

Western political and military leaders have no answers to these questions, because they have no strategy and do not understand what a strategy is. What they do have is a constant habit of coming up with clever PR¹ ideas that are disconnected from each other, but all seem good at the moment. Basically, they reflect the following “logic”:

• we do something that humiliates Russia,

• a miracle happens,

• change of government in Moscow and end of the war.

And I am not exaggerating. This is all the West is capable of, and has always been capable of, in terms of “strategic planning”. I have already stressed the need to separate aspirations from strategy.

The dream of the West

For 20 years important parts of Western governments have aspired to remove Putin from power and create a “pro-Western” government in Moscow. From time to time, they propose piecemeal initiatives - for example, sanctions - that they think will move events in this direction. But most of the time these are only hopes, fuelled by the belief that no “anti-Western” leader can ever be representative of his people and therefore will not last long. But this approach ignores the most fundamental questions of strategy: what is the clearly defined end-state that is being sought, how do we get there, and is it really achievable? Because if these questions cannot be answered, any “strategic” planning is useless. As for the last question, any military expert will tell you that, while the military can create the conditions for political events to occur, it cannot cause them. The relationship between the two is very complex. Remember that in 1918 the German army, severely affected by the Allies' attrition strategy, was in full retreat but still in Allied territory, and that the Allied armies advancing from the Balkans were still well outside German territory. Ending the war earlier than expected was a nervous breakdown of the German high command.

And the West is unable to answer these questions. The end state is vaguely defined as “Putin is no more”, the mechanism is “pressure” of an ill-defined nature, and the idea that a “pro-Western” government will emerge is only an article of faith. So even if one could somehow construct a “strategy” from these fragments, it would have no chance of working. Hence the essentially reactive nature of Western actions. I have already mentioned Boyd's cycle: observation, orientation, decision and action. Whoever can get around this circle as quickly as possible and “enter” the enemy's Boyd cycle, controls the development of the battle, or crisis. This is essentially what the Russians (who understand these things) have been doing since the beginning of the crisis, long before 2022.

Russians know what they are doing

On the contrary, the West, confusing vague aspirations with a real strategy, failed to understand what the Russians were trying to do and treated every Russian setback, or supposed setback, as a step on the road to victory, without looking at the big picture. Let us take a simple example. Since the beginning of the war, Russian strategy has been to provoke specific political changes in Ukraine by degrading and destroying Ukrainian forces, thus eliminating Ukraine's ability to resist Russian political demands. Once the West became involved, this strategy, while remaining essentially the same, was nuanced to include the destruction of Western-supplied equipment and, to some extent, Western-trained units (although the latter, without the former, would not pose such a great threat). Two considerations follow from this.

The first is that the reduction of Ukrainian combat capability to conditions favourable to the Russians is independent of the ebb and flow of battle. Destroying stored equipment is preferable to destroying it in combat. Destroying stored ammunition is preferable to destroying it once deployed in units. In general, defenders in a military conflict suffer fewer losses than attackers. If your goal is to destroy your enemy's combat power, especially if you know it will be difficult and expensive for him to replace it, then it makes more sense to let the enemy attack you, where he will lose more resources than you. If you have a functioning defence industry and sufficient manpower and equipment reserves, this is undoubtedly the best strategy, and that is what the Russians did in 2022-23. But the West seems incapable of realising that the enemy is not capable of dealing with the conflict. But the West seems unable to understand this and has over-interpreted Russia's strategic withdrawals as crushing defeats that would soon “bring Putin down”.

The second reason is that, insofar as Russia has territorial objectives, it is preferable to degrade Ukrainian forces to the point where they cannot defend territory and must withdraw preemptively or after a superficial defence, rather than launch deliberate attacks to seize territory. The Russians have a range of technologies that allow them to weaken the Ukrainian forces from a position far behind the line of contact. In this way, they can gradually destroy the Ukrainian ability to hold the ground without having to risk their troops and equipment in direct attacks. In recent months we have seen that this stage has indeed been reached and that the Russians are making fairly rapid progress in some key regions. But the West, obsessed with territorial control as an indicator of success, cannot understand this, having forgotten how the war ended in the West in 1918, when the Allies' territorial gains were still quite modest.

The liberal mind does not understand war

To be honest (assuming one wants to be honest), these issues are very complex: no more complex, perhaps, than neurosurgery or the taxation of multinational corporations, but no less complex either. They require years of study and experience, and a willingness to master strange and sometimes counterintuitive concepts. The Western liberal mind has never wanted to do this: its ideology of radical individualism is incompatible with discipline and organisation, and its quest for immediate gratification is incompatible with any long-term planning or careful implementation. Out of spite, it likes to dismiss the military as stupid and warmongering. When liberalism was conditioned by other religious or political forces, this was less apparent, but with the emancipation of liberalism from the control of the last generation and its domination of political and intellectual life, Western societies have now lost the ability to understand conflict and the military. In fact, it is surprising that the majority of Western military personnel are still recruited among the more conservative and traditional elements of society, where liberalism has had less impact, and not among liberal urban elites.

Since the 19th century, and especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the liberal mindset has oscillated between aversion to and disdain for the military in normal times and panicky calls for its use in times of crisis or when liberal rules need to be imposed somewhere. The spread of the liberal mentality in countries like France, which has always been proud of its army, has produced a European political and media class largely incapable of understanding military matters. American liberals, as far as I know, oscillate between fear of the military and endless quotations of Eisenhower's warnings about the military-industrial complex and calls for using the military to enforce their standards (Eisenhower's remarks were, of course, a cliché of the time: there was nothing original about them).

The result is a class that makes decisions and influences, but has no real idea of strategy and conflict, and merely repeats words and phrases it has heard somewhere, like incantations. One minute the “F-16s” (whoever they are [sic]) will save the day, the next minute the “deep strikes” will bring Putin down.

For example, it is impossible for a company that grew up on just-in-time deliveries and Amazon impulse buys to understand the importance of logistics and the nature of the war of attrition that the Russians are waging. If you look at a map and try to understand (I know!), you can see that Ukrainian forces are fighting at the end of very long supply lines, particularly for Western equipment and ammunition, while the Russians are only a few hundred kilometres, at most, from their borders. The fuel consumption of heavy armoured vehicles is measured in gallons per kilometre and, although they can be delivered to the area of operations by train or transporter (which poses its own problems), they consume frightening amounts of fuel, which has to be transported, dangerously and at high cost, to the area of operations. They also break down, need new tracks and engines and an inexhaustible supply of ammunition, which must be transported forward. Leopard tanks are not really transportable to the battlefield and, if damaged, must be sent back to Poland for repairs. And almost all aspects of military operations require electricity: yes, even drone operations.

The Russians know this, of course, and have targeted electricity production and distribution systems, bridges and railway junctions, ammunition depots and logistics sites, troop concentrations and training areas. But they do not conquer large amounts of territory with daring armoured attacks, so the Ukrainians must win, right? But tanks without fuel or ammunition, or with failing engines, are useless, and once Ukrainian forces are cut off from their supply lines, it is only a matter of time before they lose the ability to fight and are forced to surrender or flee. That is what seems to be happening right now around Kursk. And if you are fighting a war of attrition and your supplies and resupply capabilities are superior to those of your enemy, you want your enemy to exhaust them as quickly as possible. So why not send, say, a large number of cheap drones that can be replaced, to absorb a large number of defensive missiles that cannot be replaced? But this is too difficult for most so-called Western experts to understand.

Russia will not invade NATO

Of course, logic applies both ways. It is hard to believe that anyone with a functioning brain could have imagined that the Russians were planning to “occupy Ukraine”, let alone in a matter of days. To the extent that the idea had anything real behind it, it was a popular memory of the rapid advance of US forces towards Baghdad in 2003, unopposed and with complete air supremacy. A simple practical example: a NATO mechanised division (when NATO had any), advancing unopposed, would occupy some 200 km of road and take several days just to get organised, leave, arrive and deploy in battle formations. And that's just for a division. The idea of doing all this against a battle-hardened army, two or three times the size of the attacking force, and defeating it in a few days is beyond ridiculous. Again, look at the map. And while you're at it, consider the current hysterical cries that “Putin wants to invade NATO”. Everything I said about NATO having difficulty moving east applies equally to the Russians moving west, if they are foolish enough to consider the idea.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Russians had chosen Kursk as their starting point, they would have had to travel some 2,000 kilometres to reach Berlin, which is the first plausible target that comes to mind (and to get there they would have had to cross Poland). To give you an idea, during the Cold War the Soviet Union's force group in Germany numbered about 350,000 men, supplemented by reservists called up in emergencies. They would attack the NATO forces in Germany, but they were only the first group and had to be wiped out. Two more groups would follow. The total distance was a few hundred kilometres. For all we knew, subduing and occupying Western Europe would have required perhaps a million men in combat units, not to mention the western flanks and countries like Turkey. All this in the context of an existential struggle, probably with nuclear weapons, from which a victorious Russia would have taken a generation to recover. We are still a long way from that.

The Defeat of the West

I believe that, in addition to crass, deliberate and culpable ignorance, we are witnessing the beginning of a nagging realisation that NATO is not strong, but weak, that its equipment is mediocre, that talk of “escalation” is meaningless in the absence of anything to escalate to, and that if the Russians wanted to, they could do a lot of damage to the West. But even then, Western experts are stuck in narratives of armoured warfare and territorial conquest. The Russians obviously don't need them. With their missile technology, which the West has systematically ignored and downplayed, they can devastate any city in the Western world and no Western state is able to react. Of course, the Russians, who know all about these things, realise that they do not need to use these missiles: the psychological leverage they have by simply possessing them will suffice. Ironically, I think the Ukrainians understand these things better than their so-called NATO mentors. Their Soviet heritage and the size of the army they have retained have given them an understanding of how large-scale operations work politically and strategically, even though they have since been targeted by NATO.

The historian and Resistance martyr Marc Bloch, who fought in the 1940 Battle of France, wrote a book about that battle, published posthumously after the war, entitled “L'Étrange Défaite” (The Strange Defeat), in which he tried to explain what had happened. His central conclusion was that the failure was intellectual, organisational and political: the Germans employed a more modern style of warfare that the French did not expect and could not cope with. Time has qualified this conclusion: German tactics were certainly innovative, with fast and penetrating armoured units and close collaboration with the air force, but they were also extremely risky and required a great deal of luck to succeed. But Bloch was right to say that the Germans had developed a style of warfare dictated by the need to avoid protracted warfare, for which there were no countermeasures at the time and which posed the defender with unexpected and, for a time, intractable problems.

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The second article, by Veronica Duranti, is a shorter one, originally in Italian, published on ComeDonChisciotte.org (CDC) on Tuesday 24th December 2024.

The importance of Trieste in the NATO-Russia clash

Since the existence of the Habsburg Empire, the position of Trieste has always been considered strategic. With the 1947 Treaty of Paris, the status of an international free zone was established for Trieste, but the Italian government, which according to the London Memorandum of 1954 is its administrator, has never fully applied the extraterritoriality and has never, in fact, made it accessible to the entire international community, as would be required by the 1947 treaty. After a series of agreements concerning the establishment of the Free Territory of Trieste and its port, 2017 saw the decree of the Minister of Infrastructure and Transport for the regulation of the administrative organisation of the Free Port of Trieste, attributing a wide range of powers to the Port System Authority.

Geographically, Trieste constitutes, and has always constituted, a fundamental junction for the connection of Mitteleuropa² with the Balkan countries and the Mediterranean and for the control of the upper Adriatic. This position makes the free port (and the city of Trieste) a strategic infrastructure for both commercial and military logistics. There are several countries with an interest in accessing and exploiting the port of Trieste. From a commercial point of view, Trieste should have been a key hub of the Chinese Silk Road, before Italy withdrew from participation in the project. It assumes the same centrality in the project, still in an embryonic phase, as an alternative to the Silk Road of the Cotton Road, a trade corridor linking Europe to India. The interests at stake in the control of the port of Trieste are therefore multiple, both commercial and military, and involve not only European countries and the United States but potentially also new global players such as Russia and China and the BRICS+ countries.

Trieste and the Trimarium project

The Three Seas Initiative saw the light in 2014 on the initiative of Polish President Andrzej Duda and his Croatian counterpart Kolinda-Grabar Kitarović and involves thirteen countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Greece) of Central Europe, which lie between (and thus connect) the Adriatic, Baltic and Black Seas.

The US study centre Atlantic Council in cooperation with the Polish study centre Central Europe Energy Partners presented the report Completing Europe, a study on the development of transport, communications and energy infrastructures throughout Central Europe, highlighting how the North-South corridor, within the framework of transatlantic cooperation, can play a vital role in ensuring economic growth, energy security, digital connectivity and logistics.

With regard to energy security, the Three Seas project assumes particular importance in the context of the war with Russia and the consequent need to find alternative energy sources to its gas. Among the most important infrastructures in the Balkan and Central European area are the LNG terminal in Świnoujście, Poland, close to the Polish-German border, and the Croatian terminal on the island of Krk. In terms of energy interconnection, the BRUA and the Baltic Pipe are worth mentioning. The BRUA connects Bulgaria, Romania (which is expected to become Europe's largest producer of natural gas by 2027), Hungary [Ungheria in Italian, hence the U in the acronym] and Austria and, according to the recent Memorandum of Understanding between Serbia and Romania, from next year also Belgrade. The Baltic Pipe transports gas from Norway to Poland via Denmark and has been recognised as being of strategic interest by the European Union.

Another area of cooperation and development of interest to the twelve countries is digital interconnection and cybersecurity, a sector in which the region between the three seas will, according to analysts, be of strategic importance in the years to come. With this in mind, the Trimarium Digital Highway aims to improve data transfer, including 5G and fibre optics, and to enhance communications.

In terms of logistics, the two main infrastructures are the Via Carpathia and the Rail-2-Sea. The former is a transnational motorway network, scheduled to open in 2025, connecting Klaipėda in Lithuania to Thessaloniki in Greece, passing through Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The Rail-2-Sea is a railway infrastructure linking the Polish port of Gdansk with the Romanian port of Constanta and will have both civil and military use.

The Trimarium project, especially its logistical component, was strongly desired and encouraged by the United States. The war in Ukraine and the subsequent sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines led to a progressive deterioration of relations between Western Europe and the Russian Federation and the sliding of the new “Iron Curtain” to the East. The strategic importance of the Central European countries for the United States in maintaining their hegemonic position in Europe can be placed within this framework: they constitute an unsaturated market in terms of digital technology, and therefore a market to which investments can be allocated through which to strengthen reciprocal economic ties; they are located in a geographical position that acts as a buffer between Russia and Western Europe, and their control is also fundamental for the ousting of China from that area.

From the perspective of a potential war between the NATO countries and the Russian Federation, the Trimarium countries would occupy a position of crucial importance for the logistics of military operations.

Within the geopolitics of the European area between the three seas, Trieste plays a key role, with the N3 Corridor project, which consists of a triangle connecting Gdansk, Trieste and Constanța, conceived by Washington with a view to strengthening the north-south infrastructural axis, so as to be able to mobilise forces along NATO's longitudinal border that runs from Gdansk to Constanța and is parallel to the line of the European isthmus that runs from Kaliningrad to the port of Odessa.

If from an economic and commercial point of view Trieste represents the main transit point to and from the industrial heart of Europe, linking northern Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and eastern Europe, as well as the most suitable European port for connecting the Old Continent to the Indo-Pacific, from a military point of view Trieste, as part of the N3 corridor, would have the function of a logistical backwater and transit point for war material, above all it is able to accommodate large ships thanks to its deep seabed and has a position of great utility due to its proximity to the USAF base at Aviano.

Trieste in the clash for multipolarism: future hypotheses

Trieste in the perspective of a clash caused by the crisis of US unipolarism could potentially represent a field of tension between the United States and the powers that contend for global hegemony; the ethno-linguistic duality and the different senses of national belonging, as well as the intolerance with which a part of the population of Trieste lives the non-realization of the Free Territory of Trieste and the Italian administration of the place, added to the geopolitical and international factors, could make Trieste a hotbed of crisis in the years to come.

Another hypothesis, which is more likely to be realised, is the consolidation of Trieste within the Atlantic Alliance, an increase in US control over the port (a process already underway) and its militarisation with a view to a possible war clash with the Russian Federation and control of the Balkan territory (another possible ground for a proxy war between the West and the Russian Federation), making it a new battle front and directly involving the Italian peninsula. Even in the hypothesis that a direct clash between European countries and NATO and the Russian Federation would not take place, the economic and geopolitical relevance assumed by the countries that took part in the Trimarium project, even if only in the perspective of a “new cold war”, Trieste and the control of and access to its port assume a fundamental strategic importance for the coming years, incomparable to that which it had in past decades when the centre of US military and economic interests in Europe had shifted to the West.

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1. Public Relations

2. German term for Central Europe - Wikipedia