Italy Gets Tough on Iran

Amy K. Rosenthal, The Weekly Standard:

And the Italians are in a unique position to put pressure on the mullahs.

When the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared last month that "Israel should be wiped off the map," Giuliano Ferrara, director of Il Foglio, a conservative Italian newspaper close to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, took immediate action. He quickly announced a public protest defending Israel's right to exist outside the Iranian Embassy in Rome. (The protest took place on November 3.) Many foreign intellectuals such as Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Alain Finkelkraut quickly lent their support. In Italy, over a hundred of the country's most prominent politicians supported the protest, including not only Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini and the European Union Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini--both allies of the center-right Berlusconi-led government--but also center-left opposition leaders such as Francesco Rutelli and Piero Fassino, in what quickly became a bi-partisan event. The emergence of an almost universal consensus in favor of an initiative promoted by a conservative newspaper was a newsworthy event.

Even more newsworthy, however, is the fact that this protest came from Italy, Iran's foremost economic partner within the European Union. In 2003 alone, Italian exports to Iran amounted to almost 2 billion euros, while imports from Iran stood at 1.9 billion euros. Italy relies on Iran for 90 percent of its oil. READ MORE

Diplomatic ties between the two countries were instantly turned upside down. Iran's Foreign Ministry quickly summoned Italian Ambassador Roberto Toscano to complain about the Rome rally and a small counter-protest was organized outside the Italian Embassy in Tehran by several Iranian student groups.

While over 15,000 Italian protesters showed up outside the Iranian Embassy in Rome chanting in Farsi "Live Liberty! Live Israel!", only 70 people stood outside the Italian Embassy in Tehran on the same day chanting, "Death to Israel! Death to America!"

While Italy does not sit on the U.N. Security Council, the vigorous dissent of almost the entire Italian political community in relation to Iran opens a door of opportunity for a joint policy of containment and isolation conducted by Italy and the United States, with the possibility that Italy could convince other E.U. members to follow suit. Or Italy could act as a potential mediator between the United States and Iran. As Ilan Berman, vice president for policy at the American Foreign Policy Council remarked, "The U.S. over the last 10 to 15 years has divested itself of any economic leverage over Iran through legislation like the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act; Europe, on the other hand, has a lot to bring to the table with regard to carrots and sticks that can be used to pressure Iran to do certain things either diplomatically or economically."

Given the enormous amount of diplomatic and economic leverage Europe holds over Iran at the moment, it would be in the interests of both the United States and Europe to send a unified message to Tehran that would compel the current regime to reconsider their pursuit of nuclear weapons and support of international terrorism. While it is uncertain as to whether or not other European Union members will follow in the steps of Italy, at least the latter has opened an honest discussion about the Iranian regime's character and behavior in these past weeks.

Amy K. Rosenthal is a freelance journalist who lives in Italy. She is completing a doctorate in Contemporary European History at Queen Mary (University of London).