Ukraine’s Sole Supporter in Trump’s Right-Wing Euro-Clique Scores a Win

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni seems to have pulled a diplomatic rabbit out of a hat.

In recent decades, Iran has had a relatively good relationship with Italy as far as Western European governments go, but last month Tehran warned Rome about bending to the “political and hostile goals” of the United States, after Italian authorities in Milan arrested an Iranian engineer pursuant to a US Department of Justice warrant for a drone attack in Jordan last year.

A few days after that, an Italian journalist was detained in an Iranian jail, broadly seen as a bargaining chip. On Dec. 19, the 29-year-old correspondent for conservative Italian tabloid Il Foglio, Cecilia Sala, a was arrested for ostensibly “violating the law of the Islamic Republic of Iran” and is currently being held in Tehran’s Evin Prison.

But on Wednesday, Iran released Sala, without explanation, and she boarded a plane for Rome.

Meloni’s office heralded Salas’ return as a great success, stating, “Thanks to intense work on diplomatic and intelligence channels, our compatriot has been released by the Iranian authorities and is returning to Italy.”

The journalist’s father, Renato Sala, praised the government in Rome for an “exceptional job,” adding that he had had the impression that this was the outcome of a “game of chess, but with more than two players.”

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With two weeks to his inauguration, Trump set alarm bells ringing with provocative statements including refusing to rule out using military force to seize Denmark’s territory Greenland.

It would be surprising if the timing of Meloni’s trip to visit US President-elect Donald Trump at his Florida resort this past weekend were purely coincidental. While neither Trump nor Meloni revealed the nature of their dinner table discussion on Saturday, the Italian prime minister said she walked away from it “satisfied” and appreciated the “climate of reciprocity.”

All of this begs the question, did the meeting with Trump have anything to do with Salas’ release? If so, then Meloni would appear to have Trump’s ear, which would make her the one right-wing leader in Europe who stanchly supports Ukraine and also has a seat of honor at the incoming American administration’s table.

The 47-year-old Italian prime minister has charmed Trump’s inner circle with her smile and rare brand of continental conservatism. If and how Trump’s team addressed Meloni’s dilemma could shed some much-needed light on what the “America First” champion’s appetite for international cooperation may be.

So far, world leaders have been puzzled, to put it kindly, about the president-elect’s plans. Last Tuesday, Trump held a press conference at his Florida resort where, when sketching out his foreign policy positions, he lobbed out such ideas as: annexing Canada as the 51st state, forcing Denmark to sell him Greenland, taking back ownership of the Panama Canal by force, re-naming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” etc.

Aside from the obvious reaction from Denmark, other European leaders have not responded positively to such pre-deal posturing and have not held back their disdain, especially, for the involvement in state affairs by Elon Musk, Trump’s new diplomacy sidekick and the world’s richest man.

French President Emmanuel Macron warned that Musk was fueling a new “international reactionary movement.” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the Tesla CEO had crossed “a line” after he said the British minister responsible for safeguarding children should be jailed and was an apologist for rape, CNN reported.

By contrast, Trump and Musk’s relationship with Meloni could be described as almost a love affair. There were rumors that the thrice-divorced Space X founder and the similarly unmarried Meloni were in a budding romance. After the two were spotted together at an awards ceremony in New York in September, Musk’s mother, Maye, who was also in attendance, had to clarify that she and her son returned to their hotel together.

While Meloni is not Trump’s only right-wing ally in Europe (Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban also relished an invitation to Mar-a-Lago last year) she is certainly the only one of them who is determined to continue military aid to Kyiv.

This adds another wrinkle to Meloni’s dilemma: Two years ago, Iran began supplying Russia with Shahed unmanned aerial vehicles for combat use against Ukraine, and some foreign policy experts have said that the time is ripe for the US and Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear-development facilities. Iran is, by all accounts, a party to the Kremlin’s atrocities in Ukraine.

If there were ever a comfortable time for Meloni to be asking the US to make concessions towards Iran, this was not that time. And, considering his past remarks about Tehran’s role in attacking Israel, it would be highly unusual if Trump were to have granted such a request under any circumstances once he returns to the Oval Office later this month.

And yet, there she was at Mar-a-Lago, dining with her fawning fans, faced with just such a predicament

Mohammad Abedini was arrested at Milan’s Malpensa airport on Dec. 16, and US authorities have requested his extradition to America, accusing him of supplying the drone technology to Iran used in a January 2024 attack in Jordan that killed three American soldiers. Iran’s foreign ministry called the Italian move “an illegal act that was done based on US demands and in line with the political and hostile goals of the country to hold Iranian nationals hostage in various points in the world.”

No mention was made about the Iran affair in comments after the weekend meeting in Florida, nor about any substantive policy discussions. Trump noted only: “We’re just having dinner tonight,” and that, “She has really taken Europe by storm.”

For her part, Meloni said only, “It went well. I’m more than satisfied. We are ready to work together in a constructive way, within a climate of reciprocity.”

Of course, for the next two weeks, the President of the United States is Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, and Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will be meeting with Meloni in Rome later this week, coinciding with the Catholic president’s final European state visit and an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican. (Biden was originally slated to attend the meeting but has now elected to remain Stateside in light of the Los Angeles fire emergency.)

But the wheels of justice in Italy turn slowly, and Abedini’s request for house arrest will be considered by Milan’s court of appeals on Jan. 15, Turin-based La Stampa reported on Tuesday. This means that his extradition hearing almost certainly will be during Trump’s presidency.

Should the Italian courts grant him home arrest, or subsequently turn down the US request for extradition, that could be a good hint for left-leaning European leaders as to where to turn to get an important message through to the next US president.