Italy’s quiet pivot to the Indo-Pacific: Towards an Italian Indo-Pacific strategy

Abstract

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Italy is the only ‘Big Four’ European country and ‘Quint’ North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member ostensibly uninterested in the world’s geopolitical and geoeconomic epicentre. However, a number of developments contradict the assumption that Rome overlooks the importance of the IndoPacific. By analysing official policies, naval deployments, new partnerships and evolving trajectories, this article reveals that Italy’s strategic engagement with the Indo-Pacific is already significant and unfolding under three broad areas: (a) economy; (b) security; and (c) norms. It then assesses the benefits and risks of this developing foreign policy, and argues that the former outweigh the latter, a condition which is conducive to the establishment of an official Italian Indo-Pacific strategy. As the first scholarly work on the Italian role in the Indo-Pacific, this research makes a novel contribution to the literature on both Italian foreign policy and the Indo-Pacific security landscape, by investigating a complementary approach to that of existing Indo-Pacific strategies.