Italy’s recent clash involving Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, U.S. President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV is accelerating a shift toward a conservative vision of a “Europe of Nations,” in which sovereign states reclaim strategic autonomy while remaining inside the Western alliance framework, writes Alessandro Imperiali in The Conservative. At the heart of Rome’s current posture is the idea of a “Europe of Nations,” rooted in the European right’s tradition and inspired by Charles de Gaulle’s conviction that Europe must be an alliance of sovereign states, not a supranational bureaucracy. In this vision, Italy seeks renewed centrality—especially in the Mediterranean—by asserting more room for national decision‑making without formally breaking from its commitments to NATO, the European Union and the transatlantic relationship. The immediate trigger for the latest tensions was Italy’s decision not to renew its defense memorandum with Israel, officially justified by repeated attacks on Ital...
Nearly half a century after Iran’s 1979 revolution, its outcome is still widely miscast as an almost natural slide from monarchy to theocracy, yet Hossam el-Hamalawy’s analysis in The New Arab shows it was the product of fierce social and political struggle, not cultural destiny. In his piece for the London-based outlet, the Egyptian scholar-activist argues that the Islamic Republic emerged from contingent battles among competing forces within a broad revolutionary coalition, rather than from an allegedly “innately religious” society. Far from a mere religious eruption, the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi capped decades of uneven, top-down capitalist modernisation driven by oil revenues, rapid industrialisation and urban growth, alongside tightly controlled political participation. Rural displacement and widening inequality pushed millions into precarious urban life, fuelling mass unrest that, by 1978, had spilled beyond elite circles into nationwide demonstrations and cripplin...