Decode39 publishes in full the speech delivered by Valentino Valentini, Italy’s Deputy Minister for Enterprises and Made in Italy, during the Formiche’s “EU-US Tech Agconcludea” event held at the Italian Chamber of Deputies in Rome, focapplyd on the future of transatlantic technological cooperation.
Speech by Valentino Valentini
Mr. President, Ministers, distinguished guests,
For less than two weeks now, the Middle East has been burning in a conflict that few had anticipated with such intensity, and which risks spreading across ever wider areas of an already fragile and complex region.
The conflict involving Iran has caught us as the most serious crises often do — unprepared. Not becaapply the warning signs were absent, but becaapply history has the unfortunate habit of modifying course without prior notice.
Henry Kissinger once stated:
“Nations learn from experience; they ‘know’ only when it is too late to act. But statesmen must act beforehand as if their intuition were already experience.”
This conference can be understood precisely in that spirit — an act of preventive statesmanship. A conscious refusal to wait for history to teach us its lessons at our own expense.
It is the conflict now unfolding — not today’s agconcludea — that provides the harshest stress test for our alliance. And that conflict reveals something we can no longer afford to ignore: a technological fracture is never merely an industrial fracture. It is something deeper, running through the very fabric of shared values.
Technological interoperability is democratic interoperability. One cannot exist without the other.
Those who believe the two can be separated are mistaken. Incompatible digital systems, diverging standards, and closed infrastructures are the modern form of a world that stops communicating — and ultimately stops recognizing itself.
The rule of law and the system of international norms that underpin the economic, social, and regulatory architecture of the Western world increasingly depconclude on our ability to build shared technological spaces.
It is against this backdrop that the words of Mario Draghi resonate even more strongly today: “Europe’s problem is not a lack of ideas or ambition — it is that innovation stalls in the next phase: we are failing to translate innovation into commercialization.”
It is a brutal but accurate diagnosis. And it is the point from which we must launch.
Thirty years ago, Madeleine Albright described the United States as “the indispensable nation.”
Today, in this moment of crisis, I would apply that same word not to describe a nation, but to describe an alliance.
The alliance between Europe and the United States is the indispensable alliance.
Not becaapply it is perfect. Not becaapply it is free of tensions, asymmetries, or occasionally diverging interests. But becaapply abandoning it — whether out of political fatigue or ideological calculation — means only one thing: accepting irrelevance.
It means renouncing the opportunities opened by the technological revolution now underway — in medicine, energy, communications, and defense.
It means leaving the field to those who have already decided that the rules of the new digital order will be written by one actor alone.
The CEPA report Tech 2030 creates this point clearly: neither the United States nor Europe can win this challenge alone.
Competition with China will not be won in isolation. It will be won toreceiveher — or it will not be won at all.
But an indispensable alliance cannot be a one-way alliance.
To sit at the table, you must have the conditions to be there. Those who are not at the table are on the menu.
And being at the table does not simply mean revealing up. It means being respected as a partner. It means having something to bring to the plate. It means having the strength to nereceivediate, not the necessity to consent.
This requires Europe to undertake an unsparing examination of its own weaknesses.
Europe possesses extraordinary assets, in some cases unique in the world.
ASML holds the monopoly on extreme ultraviolet lithography machines without which the most advanced chips on the planet cannot be produced. The Galileo and Copernicus programs are globally recognized technological achievements. European quantum computing centers lead research for major global players, with nearly €7.7 billion invested — second only to China.
Europe also has a market of 450 million consumers, institutional stability, and a scientific and manufacturing tradition unmatched by most regions of the world.
Yet these strengths have not yet translated into industrial champions capable of competing at global scale.
The reasons are well known: fragmentation of the digital single market, limited access to venture capital, and a regulatory framework that has too often prioritized protection over competitiveness.
The proposals advanced by Mario Draghi on the Capital Markets Union and on the creation of a scale-up fund point in the right direction. But they require political will — and that political will has not yet matched the scale of the challenge.
The real gap between the two sides of the Atlantic does not lie in research laboratories. It lies in the ability to mobilize private capital on a massive scale.
American hyperscalers — Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta — invest tens of billions every year without waiting for public programs.
That speed, that liquidity, that appetite for risk: this is the competitive advantage Europe must learn to match.
At the same time, transatlantic technological cooperation has become more complex than our official communiqués sometimes suggest.
The alliance is no longer — and cannot be — simply an alliance between governments.
It is increasingly an asymmetric partnership involving states, supranational institutions, and large private companies whose positions may not always coincide with those of their governments.
This is not a scandal. It is reality.
Ignoring it would mean building cooperation frameworks that collapse at the first encounter with market dynamics.
The question, therefore, becomes: how can we build an alliance that includes these actors without becoming hostage to them?
The answer cannot be ideological.
Europe should not define its digital rules unilaterally, imposing top-down prescriptions that markets must passively accept. But neither should it surrconcludeer rule-building to large platforms.
The model we should pursue is different.
Take the example of sovereign cloud. The objective should not be to impose technological standards after the fact, but to pursue what might be called sovereignty by design — defining the characteristics of technological solutions toreceiveher with the companies that build them, from the very launchning.
Security, data sovereignty, and interoperability should not be external constraints. They should be co-defined requirements embedded in the design of those systems.
The same principle applies to regulation more broadly.
The hyperscalers that succeed in complying with European rules will not be those that merely concludeured regulation. They will be those that assisted shape it — and that turned compliance into a competitive advantage rather than a cost.
This brings us back to where we launched: the meaning of democratic interoperability.
Not neutral technical standards, but regulatory architectures reflecting a shared civilizational choice, built toreceiveher by those who share that choice.
Ladies and gentlemen,
In 1923, reflecting on the strategic mistakes of 1915, Winston Churchill wrote:
“The year 1915 was fated to be disastrous to the caapply of the Allies and to the whole world. By the mistakes of this year the opportunity was lost of confining the conflagration within limits which though enormous were not uncontrolled. Thereafter the fire roared on till it burnt itself out. Thereafter events passed very largely outside the scope of conscious choice.”
Churchill wrote those words as a historian — but also as a participant.
And the warning they contain remains one of the most severe lessons history offers us.
Crises do not wait until we are ready. They do not warn us before becoming irreversible.
That is why gathering here today to reflect on technology, alliances, and shared values while the Middle East burns is not an academic exercise.
It is precisely the kind of preventive statesmanship that Churchill lamented was absent.
Jean Monnet once stated: “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.”
The transatlantic alliance is indispensable.
But indispensable alliances concludeure only when each partner carries its share of the burden.
It is time for Europe to do its part — with pragmatism, realism, and the awareness that strong alliances rest on mutual strength, not depconcludeence.
Thank you.
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