Introduction: The Mediterranean Reaches the Pacific
In 2024, the Italian aircraft carrier Cavour led a strike group on a 158-day deployment across the Indian and Pacific Oceans — the most visible sign yet that a country long anchored in the Euro-Mediterranean has begun to treat the Indo-Pacific as part of its operational horizon. For Rome, traditionally a secondary power content to operate close to home, this is a genuine departure. It also raises a question that matters in Seoul as much as in Brussels: what kind of partner can Italy become in the region?
The answer is, in many ways, reassuring for Korea — precisely because of what Italy is not. Rome has joined the Indo-Pacific’s growing club of “like-minded” actors, but it has done so without adopting a harder, openly anti-Beijing posture. Its instinct is close to Seoul’s own: engage, diversify, protect what is strategic, but avoid turning economic interdependence with China into open confrontation. That convergence of temperament, more than any single agreement, is what makes Italy a matching choice for Korean diversification — and a useful illustration of how European engagement can reinforce, rather than complicate, Asian security.
From Rome to the East: The Shape of Italy’s Tilt
Italy’s move did not begin with the Cavour. It built on years of incremental steps: the frigate Carabiniere’s 2017 cruise, recurring anti-piracy operations, and a steady thickening of naval presence that culminated in the 2024 carrier mission and, in 2025 and 2026, the tours of the frigate Marceglia and the OPV Giovanni delle Bande Nere. Alongside the flag-showing has come substance. Italy has deepened defence-industrial cooperation across the region, opened talks on defence ties with the Philippines, attracted Indonesian interest in its naval platforms, and — most consequentially — joined the United Kingdom and Japan in the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), the sixth-generation fighter project that binds Rome directly to an Indo-Pacific partner’s security. Bilaterally, it has widened cooperation with Japan, India, the Philippines, Vietnam and South Korea. That last venture is telling: GCAP aims to field a new fighter by the mid-2030s and ranks among the most ambitious industrial undertakings Italy has ever joined, seating Rome and an Indo-Pacific partner in the same cockpit for a generation.
Why would a secondary power reach so far beyond its neighbourhood? Research based on elite interviews with Italian decision-makers points less to a sudden alarm about China than to a layered set of motives. The single most important is pressure from Biden’s United States — bilateral and multilateral — to share the burden of upholding the regional order. To this are added the pursuit of national prestige, the commercial ambitions of a competitive defence industry, and a wish to keep step with European and regional partners. Concrete fears about Chinese power are present, but they rank lower than any of these. That ordering is not a detail; it is the key to how Rome behaves once it arrives in the region.
Like-Minded — But Calibrated
Italy speaks the shared vocabulary of the region’s democracies: a free and open – but inclusive – Indo-Pacific, freedom of navigation, respect for international law, and partnership among like-minded states. Yet it stops well short of the muscular balancing that defines Japan’s rapid rearmament and export drive, or Australia’s commitment to the AUKUS submarine pact. Tokyo has lifted defence spending toward two per cent of GDP and acquired counter-strike missiles; Canberra has staked its future on nuclear-powered submarines and the technological intimacy of AUKUS. Rome has done neither, and shows little appetite to. But for instance, it joined UN monitoring mission on North Korea for the first time in 2024. The reasons are structural rather than rhetorical. The Mediterranean and its volatile southern flank remain Italy’s first-order priority, absorbing most of its attention and resources; the Indo-Pacific is a second horizon, pursued without a dedicated strategic document and under real limits of capacity. Italy’s presence is therefore best understood as one of principled presence and partnership rather than containment — a contribution to the regional balance that is real, but deliberately measured.
Seen from Seoul, this degree of caution looks like something recognisable and more sensible: the calibration of a trading nation that wants to be present and useful without being drawn into a confrontation it has neither the means nor the desire to lead.
De-risking, Not Decoupling: Rome’s China Calculus
Nowhere is Italy’s calibration clearer than in its handling of China. Rome’s 2023 decision to let its Belt and Road memorandum lapse was widely read abroad as a turn against Beijing. The manner of the exit told a subtler story: quiet, negotiated, and accompanied by explicit reassurances that commercial ties were highly desired. Italy wanted to correct a symbolic misstep without sacrificing a trade relationship it values and would like to expand. Its working China policy is one of de-risking rather than decoupling — screening sensitive investments through an enlarged “golden power” mechanism, trimming critical dependencies, and shielding strategic technologies, while keeping the door to ordinary commerce firmly open. The logic is partly material: like much of Europe, Italy runs a wide trade deficit with China and leans on Chinese inputs across manufacturing, clean technology and pharmaceuticals, so a clean break would be as costly as it is unnecessary. Rome’s answer echoes the European Union’s own watchword of “de-risking” — cut the dangerous dependencies, not the relationship.
Part of the explanation lies in domestic politics. Analyses of how China has been securitised in Italy’s political debate show that Chinese power is constructed there far more as an economic and technological challenge — over supply chains, market access and know-how — than as a military threat. A debate framed in these terms produces a policy that seeks reasonable economic and technological security rather than strategic rupture: a search for a margin of safety, not for a wall.
The same measure governs the hardest question of all. On Taiwan, Italy backs the cross-Strait status quo and a peaceful outcome free of unilateral change, yet it steers clear of the forward military commitments others now debate — the stance of a country that treats the Taiwan Strait as a global economic risk to be managed, not a front line to be manned.
The Korean Parallel and the Bilateral Dividend
This is where Italy and Korea meet. South Korea, too, is a trade-exposed, US-allied power that has chosen to protect what is strategic — semiconductors, batteries, critical supply chains — and to diversify its partners, without severing the commercial ties that bind it to its largest trading partner. Seoul, like Rome, has been careful to avoid over-securitisation, distinguishing between issues, actors and levels of threat instead of collapsing them into a single hostile bloc. For Seoul, which must manage the same exposure to China without forfeiting its security alignment with Washington, Rome’s approach is not a curiosity but a mirror. Two middle powers with the same instinct — present, allied, commercially open, and wary of needless escalation — are natural members of the flexible, minilateral coalitions that an age of “variable geometry” rewards. That logic has only sharpened as Washington’s more transactional turn pushes US allies to hedge among themselves and to build partnerships that lean on no single patron.
The practical agenda almost writes itself. Defence-industrial cooperation is the most immediate field: from naval shipbuilding to aerospace, Korean and Italian firms increasingly meet in the same European and global markets, and could collaborate at least as often as they compete. Korea’s shipbuilders and Italy’s Fincantieri, its aerospace champion Leonardo and Korea’s KAI, already chase the same European orders; coordinating where they can would turn rivalry into reinforcement. Coordination on economic security — investment screening, supply-chain resilience, shared technology standards — is a second. And the institutional scaffolding already exists. The EU–Korea Security and Defence Partnership concluded in 2024, and the NATO–IP4 channel linking the alliance to its four Indo-Pacific partners, give Rome and Seoul ready-made forums in which to align European and Asian security. For Korea, Italy is the one European partner that arrives without strings attached and without a containment agenda: a like-minded state whose engagement in Asia is designed to reinforce regional stability rather than to complicate it.
Conclusion: The Value of Measure
Italy’s turn to the Indo-Pacific is real, but its significance for Korea lies in its character more than its scale. Rome offers Seoul a partner whose chief virtue is restraint — a like-minded democracy willing to strengthen the rules-based order and to deepen economic-security cooperation, yet unwilling to define the region through confrontation with Beijing. At a moment when Seoul is being pressed, from several directions at once, to choose sides more sharply than its interests warrant, Rome represents a partner that shares its preference for measure. For a middle power, valuable like-minded partners are often those who understand why the hard edge is best kept sheathed. Italy does not pretend the Indo-Pacific is its first priority, or ask Korea to pretend Europe is. But the two middle powers recognise a shared method — and can build on it.
Lorenzo Termine
Assistant Professor
University of International Studies of Rome – UNINT