Titolo completo

Italy and the US-China Great Power Competition

In December 2023, Italy became the first country to withdraw from the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The withdrawal was the result of a domestic backlash against the unrealistic expectations surrounding the transformative impact of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the structurally unbalanced Sino-Italian relation. It was also the product of wider trends: the deterioration of the relations between the EU and China, and growing US-China antagonism under the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. After withdrawing from the BRI, the Meloni government signed in 2024 a new bilateral Action Plan with Beijing to start a new phase of the bilateral relation. Rome avoided to further raising tensions with Beijing, resisting US pressure to join freedom of operation navigations in the South China Sea and in the Taiwan Strait during the Indo-Pacific campaigns of the Italian Navy in 2024 – even though transatlantic alignment on Beijing in itself was one of the factors leading to these very same deployments. Yet Italy voted in favour of the European Commission’s decision to impose countervailing duties on made-in-China EVs. Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, notwithstanding a marked ideological affinity with the Meloni government, has added a further degree of uncertainty, forcing Italy to manage its China policy against the backdrop of fraying transatlantic ties over trade and European security.