In a Middle East shaken by the confrontation among the United States, Israel, and Iran, Italy must do its part to preserve its national interest.
Marco Rubio’s visit reopened for Rome the possibility of presenting itself as diplomatic ground for the crisis: not as an alternative to Washington, but as a useful space where military pressure can be turned into a political outcome. If a diplomatic space is needed, why not Rome?
For Italy, Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Suez, and the Mediterranean belong to the same circulatory system. If the straits close, the sea around us becomes a trap. The Roman lesson can serve as a paradigm, a possible way not to be swallowed by the vortex of war. Not out of moral vanity, nor abstract pacifism: peace is necessary because it prevents asphyxiation.
For this reason, Italy can and must make itself useful. Doing its part means working so that military pressure finds a diplomatic outlet, and so that the crisis does not turn the straits from structural chokepoints into permanent sources of strategic tension. This is not about distancing Rome from America, but about helping Washington give political form to its power.
The U.S. secretary of state’s visit came at a moment when Washington appears to be marked by an internal fracture. Rubio arrived in Rome while part of the administration seems interested in keeping a diplomatic channel open, almost distancing itself from the line of a president inclined to clothe his political power in religious symbols, in an attempt to bind the support of the Christian electorate to a form of spiritual recognition.
Italy, the historical and geographical custodian of Rome’s memory, has at its disposal a precedent that is useful not only for reading the immediate present, but also for grasping its deeper strategic meaning. Ancient Rome had to confront a dilemma that today, by cautious analogy and not by historical equivalence, also concerns Washington.
The Roman precedent helps clarify what form a possible peace may take between powers that cannot eliminate each other without paying too high a price: mutual annihilation, or at least a victory so costly that it becomes Pyrrhic.
In its confrontation with the Parthians (see Tacitus, Annals), Rome faced a problem that also speaks to the United States today: how to deal with a rooted, proud Iranian power, difficult to conquer and almost impossible to govern on a stable basis, even through that “regime change” which remains a chimera often pursued and almost never achieved. If Washington, in many respects, continues to see itself as a modern heir to Rome, then Rome’s experience with the Parthians can still offer it a useful lesson.
Rome did not always win in the same way. Against Carthage, it chose destruction, because it saw the Punic power as an existential rival in the Mediterranean: a competitor capable of challenging Rome’s control of the sea, trade routes, and western hegemony. Carthage was dangerous, but the confrontation was geographically more manageable, even though Rome had not yet acquired the familiarity with the waves that it would develop precisely through its clash with the Punic fleet. Once Carthage had been obliterated, Rome could incorporate its space into the Mediterranean system (see Polybius, Histories).
Parthia, however, was not a new Carthage. It was not a simple eastern kingdom, nor an unstable periphery to be brought back to order through one successful campaign. It was a long-standing Iranian power, rooted in a civilization older than its dynastic arrangements, protected by distance, space, and a strategic depth that Rome could not erase with a single blow.
The case of Armenia is the most instructive and the most useful for this argument. Its position allowed influence to be projected toward the Euphrates, the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia, and Upper Mesopotamia. For Rome, a hostile Armenia meant exposing Syria, Cappadocia, and eastern Anatolia to Parthian pressure; it meant having an enemy power overlooking the empire’s eastern provinces and the lines of communication toward the Levant.
A Roman province in Armenia would have required not only garrisons, logistics, and continuous campaigns, but would also have sharpened relations with the Parthians, who would have felt threatened, pushed once again to arm themselves and, sooner or later, to strike. A fully Parthian Armenia would have produced the opposite reaction: the Roman one. This is the classic dynamic of the security dilemma, from Thucydides onward: each side reads its own moves as defensive and the other’s as offensive.
The solution, therefore, could not be the absolute sovereignty of one side, but a form of indirect control.
The compromise that followed the crisis of Rhandeia, developed after 62 and culminating in the coronation of Tiridates in Rome in 66 A.D., was, from this point of view, a masterpiece of imperial strategy and of the unsaid. Tiridates, an Arsacid prince and therefore tied to the Parthian world, was recognized as king of Armenia, but his legitimacy passed through Rome, because he would receive the crown from Nero within a highly refined formula: Arsacid blood, Roman investiture. The Parthians kept one of their own men on the Armenian throne; Rome retained the symbolic right to authorize his power.
No one obtained everything, but no one lost publicly. Parthia could say it had prevented the full Romanization of Armenia and, at the same time, increased its own perception of security. The Armenian king received the crown from the emperor; therefore, in the eyes of the Roman world, order still passed through Rome. The compromise worked precisely because it did not erase the honor of either side. It recognized a mutual respect between two empires that were different and, at the same time, similar in their imperial mentality: both strong enough to consider themselves worthy of respect in the eyes of the other. Rome could claim it had preserved prestige and status. That is precisely what America needs today as well (Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXIII, 1–3; Suetonius, Nero, 13.).
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Riccardo Ficicchia a research associate at the Yorktown Institute and an intelligence analyst at an Italian investigative agency.
