Giorgia Meloni Emerges as a Champion for Western Unity

By Joseph Laconte

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

Since the creation of NATO in 1949, the most eloquent defender of the democratic ideals of the West has been the United States. Today, that role arguably belongs to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

 

“When I speak about the West, I don’t speak about the geographical space,” Meloni said during a meeting at the White House last year. “I speak about the civilization. And I want to make that civilization stronger.”

 

No U.S. administration in modern memory, however, has acted with greater indifference to the Western  political alliance than that of Donald Trump. At the conclusion of the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, the president claimed that “there was a lot of love in that room, a lot of unity.” Nonsense. Trump’s threats to seize Greenland, his criticism of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and outreach to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, his public tongue-lashing of America’s NATO allies: It is hard to conceive of conduct more disruptive of Western unity — and more welcoming to its enemies.

 

All of this was bound to put Trump on a collision course with Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, who does not suffer fools gladly. Against all odds, she founded a new political party, the Brothers of Italy, and led it to victory in the 2022 general election. Her political skills could make her Italy’s longest-serving prime minister since the end of World War II.

 

“I consider myself as just a person who has an average amount of courage in an environment where courage is lacking,” she writes in her autobiography, I Am Giorgia. She calls herself “a woman who believes that honor is the most important thing that needs safeguarding in a society that prefers to protect values that are much more material.”

 

Thus, when Trump claimed, quite outlandishly, that the Italian prime minister “begged” him for a photo opportunity at the recent G7 Summit in France, she fired back:

 

Donald Trump’s statements are completely fabricated. I am frankly appalled. I don’t know why the President of the United States behaves this way towards his allies; after all, it’s not the first time it’s happened. I can only say it’s a pity that he doesn’t show the same determination with the enemies of the West, with the enemies of the United States, with leaders towards whom he instead proves to be much more accommodating.

 

With a mixture of exasperation and disdain, she addressed Trump directly: “Pero una cosa se la deve ricordare: Io e Italia, non imploriamo mai,” meaning, “But he must remember one thing: Italy and I never beg.” With that, Meloni delivered a singular rebuke, long overdue, to the American president: Infantile outbursts that undermine democratic unity and embolden the world’s malignant forces won’t be tolerated.

 

Meanwhile, Meloni has done much to rebuild Italy’s image as a leading democratic state in Europe. Counter the Trump administration, she has been a strong supporter of Ukraine against Russia’s naked aggression. She initiated “the Italian model” of immigration reform, which seeks to balance humane treatment of migrants with control over national borders. She launched a $6 billion initiative to promote non-predatory energy and infrastructure cooperation with African states. “We must have the courage to tell it like it is,” she told the U.N. General Assembly in a 2023 speech. “Africa is not a poor continent. But it has been often, and still is, an exploited continent.”

 

Most importantly, the Italian prime minister has emerged as the most consequential European advocate for the ideals and institutions that have built Western civilization. “The West is a system of values in which the person is central, men and women are equal and free, and therefore the systems are democratic, life is sacred, the state is secular, and based on the rule of law,” she said in a 2024 speech accepting the Global Citizen Award from the Atlantic Council.

 

The enemies of the West, she insists, are not only external but also internal: the progressive “cancel culture,” for example, which has contempt for the historic accomplishments of our civilization. Today’s “liberal and globalist” voices, she writes in her autobiography, have become the counterpart to the dehumanizing policies of the old Soviet Union. “The violent repression of religions has been replaced by the social and cultural demonization of every sacred concept.” If successful, the progressive left would create societies “without freedom, without faith, without history.”

 

Unlike any other European leader, Meloni discerns the civilizational crisis that threatens to overwhelm the West — what English author Douglas Murray calls “the strange death of Europe,” the result of a profound lack of civilizational confidence. Thus, Meloni is arguably the most important champion for Western unity based upon a shared memory of its  political principles, cultural achievements, and religious traditions. “Above all,” she explained in her Atlantic Council speech, “we need to recover awareness of who we are.”

 

Up until recently, the members of NATO could count on the United States to remind the West of its democratic identity in the struggle against the forces of disintegration. That’s simply not true anymore. “It is unclear whether out of intent or ineptitude [Trump] is wrecking the historic relations between the United States and Europe,” Giovanbattista Fazzolari, undersecretary to the Italian prime minister’s office, said in a recent statement. “With his inappropriate outbursts, he has managed no easy feat, to make the United States unpopular across the entire European continent, damaging not only Europe but ⁠above all the ​United States.”

 

European leaders must contend not only with Trump’s self-absorption, personal insults, feckless foreign policy, and repeated criticism of NATO. They also must navigate around his administration’s ignorance of America’s historic debt to European civilization.

 

Enter Giorgia Meloni. No Western leader understands and embraces this cultural inheritance more fully than the Italian prime minister. “As people, as citizens, and as Italians we identify ourselves intimately — and have always done so — as Europeans and Westerners,” she writes. “Because the acknowledgement that we are part of a common myth rooted in tradition and Christianity embraces the people of Europe, but its sphere of influence extends well beyond the Old Continent.”

 

Herein lies what Italians call la forza: the strength — in this case, the source of renewal for a civilization that has lost its moorings. As Dante expressed it: “Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.”

 

It would not be the first time that Italy led the West out of the darkness. Avanti!