Rome’s defense budget is well below NATO’s target of 2% of GDP, and it is not clear how it plans to meet Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s pledge to reach that goal this year. Italy also lacks a clearly articulated vision for its contribution to European defense or an end to the war in Ukraine.
Meloni has cast herself as a strong supporter of Ukraine’s sovereignty, but this stance is increasingly at odds with divided public opinion in Italy, which is at best lukewarm towards Kyiv, and is constrained by the prime minister’s desire to maintain a special relationship with President Donald Trump. During their meeting at the White House on April 17, she reiterated Russia and Putin’s responsibility for the war while answering a question in Italian but remained silent when the president attacked Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Meloni has also been very cautious about engaging with talk of European nations securing a possible ceasefire in Ukraine, and Rome opposed the €40bn ($45bn) military support package proposed by European Union High Representative Kaja Kallas. Along with some other governments, Italy also rejected a more modest EU-led initiative to buy ammunition for Kyiv.
While Italy’s parliament has renewed its authorization for military support to Ukraine in 2025, it is unclear what this might amount to, as national stocks of legacy equipment are probably close to exhaustion.
Italy has been equally circumspect on the question of Europe’s future security architecture, and its comparatively low defense spending means it has limited ability to shape the debate. Rome’s priority is to keep the US in NATO while building up Europe’s defenses in the long term.
Meloni’s government supports the EU’s defense industrial development, particularly if more funds flow to Italy’s highly developed defense industry, but is lukewarm about the Commission’s ReArm Europe initiative to boost defense spending. The prime minister — along with Spain’s Pedro Sanchez — pushed for the name to be changed to Readiness 2030 to make it sound less militaristic (Spain’s defense spending record is even worse than Italy’s, though Madrid also announced it will increase the defense budget by €10.4 billion and meet the 2% by the end of the year).
Rome doesn’t see stronger European defense as a justification for jeopardizing or reducing ties with the US. The joint statement released after Meloni met Trump reaffirmed both sides’ intention to “increase defense equipment and technology cooperation, including co-production and co-development” initiatives.
This stance reflects a long-standing and robust defense industrial partnership between the two countries, which has included transport aircraft, surface combat ships, and combat aircraft such as the F-35. The declaration should also be understood in the context of Europe’s structural dependency on the US for key capabilities, which makes any plans for European autonomy practically impossible in the medium term.
Rome’s relative passivity on defense is rooted both in financial constraints and public opinion. Italy has long suffered from low growth and has a high debt load, making discussions about raising defense spending even more challenging than in other European countries.
Some politicians, including members of the governing coalition, also continue to define military spending and social spending as entirely incompatible, distorting discussion. Many Italians do not see Russia as a real threat, and there is significant sympathy with its narratives on both fringes of the political spectrum. In a poll in March, more than a third of supporters of Matteo Salvini’s Lega Party said they supported Russia, while a majority of the public said it did not support either side in the war.
Italy also has a deeply rooted pacifist tradition that struggles to understand the importance of deterrence and sees higher defense spending as a root cause — rather than a response to — escalating tensions and conflict. Many Italians are against the EU Commission’s rearmament plan, pushing some politicians to label the robust rhetoric of some EU leaders towards Moscow as irrationally aggressive.
A key reason behind this widespread opposition to military spending is that lawmakers from across the political spectrum have failed to clearly communicate why defense matters and are unlikely to change course. Defense remains a taboo topic that few Italian decision-makers have the courage to discuss frankly in public, even after 11 years of Russian aggression in Ukraine and repeated hybrid attacks against European countries, including Italy.
Despite these challenges, Italy is still a leading player in NATO and a manufacturing powerhouse with deep defense expertise. It has the potential to make a significant contribution to supporting Kyiv and strengthening European military capabilities, including through direct cooperation with the booming Ukrainian defense sector.
And by leveraging its strong bilateral relations with Washington, Rome could play an important role in dissuading the Trump administration from reducing its commitment to European security.
But all this would require a drastic change in the national conversation on defense at multiple levels.
- First, Italy needs a plan to reach at least the 2% of GDP target as soon as possible, with a clear policy and strategy behind it, and national security interests, goals, and the means to achieve them delineated. While increasing personnel contribution to NATO missions compensated for the budget gap in the past, this strategy is no longer viable given the current threat environment.
- Second, the Italian military urgently needs a more balanced redistribution of resources among its different functions, including personnel, training, maintenance, and investment.
- Third, Rome should focus on strategic investment in areas that add real value to Europe’s security and NATO’s deterrence, such as air and missile defense, strategic airlift, unmanned and autonomous systems, and deep-strike capabilities.
Italy needs to look beyond the four-year horizon of the current US administration and cultivate strong defense links with the US to ensure interoperability, skills exchanges, and supply chain efficiency, then use such links to help keep Washington engaged in NATO.
Italian decision-makers will also need to focus on building domestic consensus for a stronger defense posture and recasting defense spending as an opportunity for economic growth, high-skilled employment, and innovation.
At the same time, they will need to fight Russian disinformation and educate the public and the next generation of leaders on the importance of defense and deterrence. This will require dedicated education initiatives and deeper collaboration between the government, the military, academia, the private sector and civil society.
As Europe’s security deteriorates, Italy faces a choice: stepping up on defense to prepare for turbulent times or continuing along the path of procrastination. The latter would only be a disguised recipe for irrelevance and, ultimately, disaster.
Federico Borsari is a Resident Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and a cohort of the NATO 2030 Global Fellowship. At CEPA, he focuses on issues at the intersection between technology and international security, in particular unmanned systems and autonomy, and his portfolio also includes NATO and transatlantic defense and security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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