IF YOU want to know what really happened during Marco Rubio’s visit to Rome, the first rule is simple: do not read the Italian press. Most of it turned a strategic mission into a parish bulletin: first the US Secretary of State makes peace with the Pope, then he exchanges pleasantries at Palazzo Chigi. It is a comforting story, elegant, domestic, and almost entirely wrong.
Vatican First: Not Reconciliation, but Realignment
Much of the Italian press framed Rubio’s meeting with Pope Leo XIV, as an exercise in repairing relations between Washington and the Holy See after tensions associated with Pope Francis and the Trump presidency. That reading is superficial and largely domestic in purpose.
The meeting was not about reconciliation, but for realignment. It reflected the Secretary of State’s understanding of a broader ecclesiastical and political transition inside the Catholic Church.
After the exhaustion of the Francis era – marked by the moral and institutional residue of liberation theology spread with softer contemporary language – the election of an American pope signalled an attempt to restore the Church to a more traditional role: ethical conscience of the West rather than political programme for the Global South. Francis often blurred that distinction, encouraging readings of the papacy as a platform for social mobilisation rather than spiritual authority.
Rubio, himself a practising Catholic, approaches the issue with conceptual clarity. When the Pope speaks as spiritual shepherd, he commands respect as a religious authority. When he speaks as a temporal sovereign advancing geopolitical preferences, he enters ordinary political debate and weakens the universal nature of his office.
That distinction matters. The concern emerged when Pope Leo XIV addressed Venezuela in January after the US operation that removed Nicolás Maduro from power. Leo declared that he was following events with a ‘heart full of concern’ and insisted that ‘the good of the beloved Venezuelan people must prevail over every other consideration’, calling for the country’s sovereignty to be safeguarded and for international law to be respected. He urged that Venezuela remain an independent nation and stressed constitutional order. In Washington, those remarks immediately placed the White House on alert. While framed in pastoral language, they were widely read inside the administration as a political signal against American intervention and as a warning against legitimizing regime change through force. The language caused concern because it appeared to echo the familiar anti-American grammar of multilateral institutions, where sovereignty and humanitarian restraint are often invoked selectively against US action while authoritarian regimes are treated with studied ambiguity. In that reading, the Vatican risked sounding less like a moral authority and more like another diplomatic chamber of procedural anti-Americanism.
For Rubio and the conservative Catholic bloc around him, this reinforced a central principle: once the Pope moves from moral teaching into the language of statecraft, he enters the arena of strategic contest and risks weakening the spiritual universality of his office.
Rubio’s broader objective is domestic as much as diplomatic: reunifying the Christian electorate – evangelicals and Catholics alike – around the civilisational language of the West, order, and religious continuity. If the Church is to retain a political role at all, in his view, it should be as custodian of Western civilisation rather than as chaplain to militant third-worldism disguised as moral universalism. Rome should remind the West of what it is, not provide theological cover for every anti-Western revolutionary sentiment that presents itself as social justice. That coalition cannot be consolidated while major sectors of the Church continue drifting toward the pro-Palestinian posture encouraged by figures such as Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa and by a broader Vatican diplomatic culture increasingly detached from strategic realities.
For Washington’s conservative foreign-policy bloc, rallying Western Christianity requires strategic clarity on Israel and a Vatican conscious of its civilisational function. The formula is therefore clear: more Wojtyła, less Francis.
Palazzo Chigi: Courtesy Without Convergence
Italian coverage also misread Rubio’s subsequent meeting with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as warm and conciliatory. Diplomatic choreography should not be confused with strategic agreement.
The conversation was difficult.
Rubio’s message was direct: one cannot be fully Atlanticist and preach European strategic autonomy at the same time when the two projects diverge. Europe’s security architecture rests on American power. Strategic autonomy remains, in practice, a political slogan sustained by US guarantees.
Nato is not merely a military alliance. It is a system of projection built around bases, logistics, intelligence, and interoperability that allow the United States to defend its interests beyond its own shores. If allies restrict operational access while continuing to claim alliance benefits, the strategic meaning of Nato becomes hollow.
From Washington’s perspective, denying effective use of that network while preserving rhetorical Atlanticism is contradiction, not prudence.
The Hormuz Argument and Italy’s Energy Reality
Rubio was particularly puzzled by the Italian government’s repeated emphasis on ‘maritime routes’ and the Strait of Hormuz as justification for strategic caution.
Italy is not structurally dependent on Gulf crude in the way the public debate often suggests. Its principal oil suppliers are Libya, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and the United States, with Libya alone accounting for nearly one-fifth, and by some 2025 estimates, nearly one-quarter, of Italian crude imports. Reuters reported last week that Libya remains Rome’s largest crude supplier, covering nearly 20 percent of imports. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan remain central through Mediterranean and Black Sea routes, while US energy flows have grown after Europe’s post-Russia diversification.
The claim that Italy’s strategic posture must be dictated by Hormuz is therefore overstated. Price volatility is global, but direct physical dependence is limited.
EastMed: A Strategic Opportunity Italy Hesitated to Embrace
This raises the question of the Eastern Mediterranean.
‘EastMed’ refers to the emerging strategic energy and security corridor linking Israel, Cyprus, Greece, and potentially Italy through offshore gas development, LNG infrastructure, and maritime security co-ordination. It includes not only the debated EastMed pipeline project itself, but the broader geopolitical architecture of energy extraction from the Levant Basin and its transport into Europe.
For years, segments of the Italian state apparatus treated the project with caution or indifference, preferring ambiguity in order to preserve flexibility with North Africa, Turkey, and traditional continental balances.
That hesitation now looks less prudent.
As instability in the Gulf raises the political cost of dependency narratives, EastMed appears less as an optional diplomatic theatre and more as a strategic opening: diversification without vulnerability to Hormuz, stronger alignment with Israel and Greece, and a Mediterranean security posture anchored in allied rather than revisionist actors.
Rubio’s Rome message was therefore not conciliatory but disciplinary. The United States was not asking Italy for symbolic solidarity. It was asking for strategic coherence. In both the Vatican and Palazzo Chigi, the point was the same: one may enjoy the language of sovereignty in Rome, but the umbrella still opens in Washington.
This article appeared in American Thinkeron May 12, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
