Rome's Lesson for Not Losing the Way in Iran

In a Middle East shaken by the confrontation among the United States, Israel, and Iran, Italy must do its part to preserve its national interest.

For Italy, Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, Suez, and the Mediterranean belong to the same circulatory system. If the straits close, the sea around us becomes a trap. The Roman lesson can serve as a paradigm, a possible way not to be swallowed by the vortex of war. Not out of moral vanity, nor abstract pacifism: peace is necessary because it prevents asphyxiation.

For this reason, Italy can and must make itself useful. Doing its part means working so that military pressure finds a diplomatic outlet, and so that the crisis does not turn the straits from structural chokepoints into permanent sources of strategic tension. This is not about distancing Rome from America, but about helping Washington give political form to its power.

Italy, the historical and geographical custodian of Rome’s memory, has at its disposal a precedent that is useful not only for reading the immediate present, but also for grasping its deeper strategic meaning. Ancient Rome had to confront a dilemma that today, by cautious analogy and not by historical equivalence, also concerns Washington.

The Roman precedent helps clarify what form a possible peace may take between powers that cannot eliminate each other without paying too high a price: mutual annihilation, or at least a victory so costly that it becomes Pyrrhic.

In its confrontation with the Parthians (see Tacitus, Annals), Rome faced a problem that also speaks to the United States today: how to deal with a rooted, proud Iranian power, difficult to conquer and almost impossible to govern on a stable basis, even through that “regime change” which remains a chimera often pursued and almost never achieved. If Washington, in many respects, continues to see itself as a modern heir to Rome, then Rome’s experience with the Parthians can still offer it a useful lesson.

Rome did not always win in the same way. Against Carthage, it chose destruction, because it saw the Punic power as an existential rival in the Mediterranean: a competitor capable of challenging Rome’s control of the sea, trade routes, and western hegemony. Carthage was dangerous, but the confrontation was geographically more manageable, even though Rome had not yet acquired the familiarity with the waves that it would develop precisely through its clash with the Punic fleet. Once Carthage had been obliterated, Rome could incorporate its space into the Mediterranean system (see Polybius, Histories).

Parthia, however, was not a new Carthage. It was not a simple eastern kingdom, nor an unstable periphery to be brought back to order through one successful campaign. It was a long-standing Iranian power, rooted in a civilization older than its dynastic arrangements, protected by distance, space, and a strategic depth that Rome could not erase with a single blow.

The case of Armenia is the most instructive and the most useful for this argument. Its position allowed influence to be projected toward the Euphrates, the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia, and Upper Mesopotamia. For Rome, a hostile Armenia meant exposing Syria, Cappadocia, and eastern Anatolia to Parthian pressure; it meant having an enemy power overlooking the empire’s eastern provinces and the lines of communication toward the Levant.

A Roman province in Armenia would have required not only garrisons, logistics, and continuous campaigns, but would also have sharpened relations with the Parthians, who would have felt threatened, pushed once again to arm themselves and, sooner or later, to strike. A fully Parthian Armenia would have produced the opposite reaction: the Roman one. This is the classic dynamic of the security dilemma, from Thucydides onward: each side reads its own moves as defensive and the other’s as offensive.

The solution, therefore, could not be the absolute sovereignty of one side, but a form of indirect control.

The compromise that followed the crisis of Rhandeia, developed after 62 and culminating in the coronation of Tiridates in Rome in 66 A.D., was, from this point of view, a masterpiece of imperial strategy and of the unsaid. Tiridates, an Arsacid prince and therefore tied to the Parthian world, was recognized as king of Armenia, but his legitimacy passed through Rome, because he would receive the crown from Nero within a highly refined formula: Arsacid blood, Roman investiture. The Parthians kept one of their own men on the Armenian throne; Rome retained the symbolic right to authorize his power.

No one obtained everything, but no one lost publicly. Parthia could say it had prevented the full Romanization of Armenia and, at the same time, increased its own perception of security. The Armenian king received the crown from the emperor; therefore, in the eyes of the Roman world, order still passed through Rome. The compromise worked precisely because it did not erase the honor of either side. It recognized a mutual respect between two empires that were different and, at the same time, similar in their imperial mentality: both strong enough to consider themselves worthy of respect in the eyes of the other. Rome could claim it had preserved prestige and status. That is precisely what America needs today as well (Cassius Dio, Roman History, LXIII, 1–3; Suetonius, Nero, 13.).

This is the Roman lesson: when an enemy cannot be destroyed without then having to govern the ruins it leaves behind, an order must be built in which even the adversary can enter without feeling annihilated. A peace imposed only as humiliation prepares the next war. An “imperfect” peace, but one that is geopolitically effective, must instead allow each side to present the compromise as the protection of its essential interests, preserving prestige, avoiding the hardening of tensions, and preventing a deadly confrontation between two powers from exploding (ibid., 4–7.).

Applied to the Iranian conflict, the lesson is clear. The United States must be able to present a controlled reduction of tensions as the result of its pressure, not as a retreat. Washington must be able to say that it prevented Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, guaranteed Israel’s security, and preserved freedom of navigation. Yet precisely because the American objective remains to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran, a formula is needed that Tehran can accept without reading it as total surrender.

Iran should be placed in a position to accept verifiable limits, strict inspections, and guarantees on the non-military nature of its nuclear program, preserving at most a civilian space subject to monitoring. This means structuring the agreement so that, for Iran, violating it costs more than remaining inside it. A lasting arrangement cannot be built on naïve trust, but neither can it rest on pressure alone. It must create incentives, room for maneuver, and a minimal political off-ramp, while at the same time preserving the tools necessary to detect and punish any attempt to use the agreement as cover.

For this reason, the formula should operate on two levels. On one side, the visible level of diplomacy, inspections, and limits on military nuclear capability. On the other, the quieter level of intelligence.  Israeli, American, and European intelligence cooperation would have to remain active in order to determine whether hidden stockpiles exist, where they are located, and how to deny Iran effective access to them, without imagining the deployment of thousands of troops across Iran’s mountains. The tactic, here, must remain subtle. Most of the work moves in the shadows, where the apparatuses can obtain what open war risks only making more difficult.

This is where military pressure alone risks producing the opposite of the desired effect. Despite the missiles launched and the facilities struck, the offensive did not overthrow the Islamic Republic, did not erase Iran’s ballistic arsenal, and did not definitively close the nuclear question. On the contrary, it may have strengthened among the Iranian population the reflex of national cohesion around the state, precisely after the Islamic Republic had been described as close to collapse. But that collapse did not happen.

An attack can slow Iran’s nuclear program, but it can also strengthen in Tehran the idea that only an atomic deterrent can prevent future attacks. This does not mean that a nuclear Iran would be acceptable, or that it would use the bomb only defensively; on the contrary, a nuclear-armed Iran would represent a broader strategic threat. Precisely for this reason, the American objective must remain to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. But force must be accompanied by a credible diplomatic formula. Otherwise, there is a risk of temporarily striking the program while confirming the very logic that feeds it.

The point is to prevent Iran from concluding that only nuclear deterrence can guarantee its survival. Here, survival should not be understood as the survival of the regime, its proxy network, or its revolutionary ideology, but as something deeper, because war is also, and above all, an anthropological question. It concerns the way a people perceives itself, its security, its history, and its continuity.

It is the population, in the final instance, that provides power with a basis of endurance, whether through consent, acquiescence, fear, habit, or national identification.

No regime, not even the most despotic, can truly last if it is perceived as completely separate from the destiny of the country it claims to embody. For this reason, when external pressure is read not only as an attack on the government, but as the humiliation of Iran as such, the regime can transform it into a narrative of national resistance. And part of society, even without loving the regime, may end up accepting this reading if it perceives the external attack as a threat to Iran’s dignity and continuity.

Many Iranians may oppose the Islamic Republic and, at the same time, reject the idea that their country should be humiliated, destroyed, or broken apart by a foreign power. If an agreement is perceived in Tehran as pure capitulation, it will hardly even be put on paper. Not to save the regime, but to deprive it of the argument that only the bomb can save Iran.

Moreover, Tehran may see China and Russia as useful external shores. The more American pressure is perceived as an existential threat, the greater the risk that Iran, Russia, and China may find it convenient to set aside their differences and consolidate a common anti-Western front.

China, for example, risks losing access to an abundant source of low-cost Iranian oil. However, Beijing may be willing to bear this sacrifice temporarily if a prolonged war in Iran forces the United States to concentrate attention, military resources, and political capital in the Middle East. For China, it is not the same thing to have the United States fully focused on the Indo-Pacific, Taiwan, and the containment of China, or to see it engaged in another theater. It may be convenient for Beijing to have its main strategic competitor absorbed elsewhere.

The same applies, in a different way, to Russia. Moscow may benefit both from higher global energy prices and from American distraction from the European front. With the United States engaged in the Middle East and the Europeans divided among themselves, the Kremlin would have greater room to intensify pressure on Ukraine. The Russian attack of May 24, 2026, one of the heaviest since the beginning of the war, with around 90 missiles and 600 drones, including the use of the Oreshnik missile, shows how Moscow can exploit every window of Western distraction.

In geopolitical terms, therefore, the objective should not be only to prevent an Iranian bomb, but also to avoid a prolonged stalemate in the Middle East offering Russia and China the opportunity to pursue their own interests without obstacles.

What is needed, then, is a space in which force can be converted into diplomacy, a place capable of giving political and symbolic form to compromise. Italy, precisely because of the historical framework recalled so far, could offer that space.

Islamabad is a Muslim nuclear power, shares a border with Iran, and hosts the second-largest Shia community in the world, the first being Iran. To this must be added the presence of transnational ethnic realities, especially the Baloch, which connect the Iranian and Pakistani spaces. If a negotiation takes place in a country so close, in terms of history, border, and social composition, to the Iranian space, the diplomatic balance risks appearing more inclined toward Tehran. Rome, instead, would have another function. It occupies an intermediate position between the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Near East.

For the Italian peninsula, this would mean recovering something of the prestige of the Urbe and transforming it into diplomatic capital. For Washington, instead, it would not only mean presenting itself once again as heir to the Empire par excellence, but adopting, after diplomatic work under the sign of Rome, its subtler logic: understanding that compromise is not an end in itself, nor a disguised surrender, but an instrument of power.

In this case, compromise would serve not only to contain Iran’s nuclear program, but also to prevent Tehran’s hostility toward the West from becoming increasingly and more durably aligned with the interests of Moscow and Beijing. Rome has an interest in presenting itself as the place where such a formula can take shape, removing the Iranian crisis from a purely military logic and preventing it from further worsening Italy’s Mediterranean vulnerability.

It is in this key that the line of the Italian government can be interpreted. And it is also, in parallel, the line chosen by the Vatican. The religion of the Church and the secular nature of the state remain two separate realities, but in this crisis they seem to move along two parallel lines oriented in the same direction: remaining inside the Western alliance is not in question, but it is necessary to avoid being automatically absorbed into the gravitational pull of war

This line belongs to the same relationship with the United States. If Americans think of themselves, and are often thought of, as modern heirs of Rome, they cannot do without a relationship with the past. To truly follow an imperial grammar means searching in the past for the forms capable of giving order to the present. If Washington still wants to remain an ordering power, it must remember that great peoples do not live only from the ability to punish, but also from the ability to take one step back, even a simulated one, in order to take a hundred forward.

And if one wished to go even further back, while remaining within the Western genealogy, the question could be asked: what would Ulysses, the strategist par excellence, have done? The Trojan horse, an apparent gift and a decisive deception, belongs to the same logic. After ten years of war that had exhausted the Achaeans, Troy did not fall through the mere accumulation of force, but through an act of cunning capable of turning a military impasse into a political result.

As for Italy, the Sigonella refusal should not be read as a distancing from the United States. As Defense Minister Guido Crosetto reiterated in his briefing to the Chamber of Deputies on April 7, 2026, on the use of U.S. bases in Italy, Italy can distance itself from what it does not share without breaking the alliance: the United States does not coincide with Biden, Trump, or Clinton, just as Italy does not coincide with Meloni, Conte, or Draghi. Immediately after, Crosetto recalled that Italy and the United States have been allied nations for decades and that an important part of Italian security also rests on this relationship. But precisely because the alliance is solid, it cannot break at the first gust of contrary wind. To put it simply: a friendship does not end merely because, in the face of a crisis, there are different positions on the best way to proceed.

Hormuz and the maritime routes matter to the Mediterranean more than almost anything else. In a Mediterranean that seems short of breath because of the vulnerability of isthmuses and compulsory passages, lucidity is required. And lucidity, in this case, means first of all not further worsening the state of things.

The meeting between Giorgia Meloni and the U.S. secretary of state confirmed this approach. The Italian prime minister reaffirmed the value of the transatlantic relationship.

Rome is not pulling back, declaring itself unavailable, or abandoning Washington at a moment when freedom of navigation is at stake. On the contrary, Italy is preparing to be there. While it continues to seek a diplomatic way out, it is positioning its minesweepers and naval capabilities so that, even if an agreement struggles to mature in the short term, Italy can still contribute and make itself useful in reopening the Strait.

Italy knows Machiavelli well enough to understand that power requires both the lion and the fox. Without force, diplomacy risks remaining mere aspiration; but without cunning, force hardens and becomes trapped in the very confrontation it has opened.

In the end, Italy’s function should be to become a space in which the military drift toward an endless war can be brought back to a reasoned, cunning, and diplomatically sustainable solution. If the United States has chosen to use the strength of the lion, Italy should try to embody the other half of Machiavelli’s lesson, the cunning of the fox, which does not always confront the collision head-on, but moves around it, empties it out, works it from below and in the shadows, until force is transformed into political order.

The Roman lesson would offer not only an interpretive key, but also a narrative capable of giving form to the present, especially for those who see force as the only useful instrument. It would remind them that compromise does not necessarily mean surrender and that, at times, it can be the most astute way to prevent power from becoming captive to its own strength, and therefore to itself.

Riccardo Ficicchia is an intelligence analyst at an Italian investigative agency and a research associate at the Yorktown Institute.