The streets of Tehran close the year that marks the definitive turning point in our era.

It is not just an end-of-year postcard, nor yet another snapshot of a distant crisis to be dismissed with a sigh. It is a brutal reminder: regimes do not age with dignity when they feel time is running out. They stiffen. They tighten their grip. And, if they can, they export their fear. They no longer hide, they show their worst face.

It is the same battle as the Donetsk trenches, the Taiwan Strait, the elections in Budapest.

The most cowardly habit of the West is to treat these theatres as watertight compartments: war here, intimidation there, propaganda elsewhere. But the plot is unique. The uniforms change, not the logic: test the boundaries, wear down the democracies, convince them that fatigue is wisdom and cynicism is realism. And that everything is relative, since the fall of the wall.

There are facets, problems, battles that we can and could do and battles for which we do not have the courage or capacity.

And herein lies the uncomfortable part: not everything is within our grasp, not everything is advisable, not everything is even morally clear. But doubt cannot become a permanent alibi. It is one thing to measure the means, quite another to declare surrender in advance, turning limitation into political identity: ‘we cannot’, ‘we must not’, ‘we are not that kind of country’. It does not concern us.

This cannot leave room for the relativism of the world’s right and left.

Because relativism, today, is not a refined intellectual exercise: it is a service rendered to the strongest. It is the loophole of the clever and the refuge of the fearful, declined in a thousand accents: mannered anti-Americanism, parlor anti-Westernism, talk show realpolitik, pacifism that looks too much like the comfort of those who will not pay the bill.

There is one good, the freedom offered by liberal democracies, with all its limitations.

This freedom is imperfect, yes: it produces inequalities, frustrations, resounding failures. But it contains a mechanism that regimes fear more than anything else: the possibility of correcting themselves without bloodshed. Criticism, the press, alternation, opposition. They are flaws, for those who dream of the ultimate order; they are the very reason why it is worth defending.

There is an evil, laissez-faire autocracy. And it is fuelled by the indifference, superficiality, connivance, and inferiority syndrome that too many in the West experience with regard to the ‘strong men’ in charge, an illusion that already caused immense tragedies in the 20th century.

And this syndrome has a recognisable lexicon: ‘at least they decide’, ‘at least there is order there’, ‘at least they defend values’. As if freedom were a whim and not an infrastructure. As if the speed of a signature is worth more than the dignity of a citizen. Strong men’ work as long as someone remains weak: opponents, neighbours, minorities, supporters themselves when they stop being useful.

On the other side we hear the “why are we better?”, “we are not the ones who can teach”, “so what about us”. As if the dissidents committed suicide by Putin, the university girls kidnapped by Khamenei, were assimilable to our small and large democratic imperfections.

There is no longer even ‘every man as he pleases at home’. The battle is at home, in Europe, in Italy.

Because autocracy is not content to govern: it wants to contaminate. It buys influencers and newspapers, sows distrust in institutions, finances opaque networks, fuels polarisation and resentment. It strikes at our fragilities: slow bureaucracies, short politics, anxious economy, exhausted citizens. And when it finds a crack – an energy dependency, a strategic supply chain, a party in search of shortcuts – it throws in the lever. Because it is afraid. Because more than us, their citizens yearn for the freedom that we no longer see.

Either you fight or you lose everything.

Fighting does not only mean sending weapons or raising sanctions. It means defending Europe’s ability to make decisions, investing in security, protecting critical infrastructure, recognising that propaganda is a weapon and that democracy is not an automatic habit. It also means accepting that neutrality, in times like these, is often a choice in favour of the aggressor. It means hard and unpopular choices.

Some will wake up in 2026. Others will continue with their hairy hypocrisy.

There will be sudden conversions, electrocuted analysts, politicians who discover ‘now’ what was evident ‘before’. And there will be the professionals of ambiguity: those who condemn in words and justify in deeds, who invoke peace while sabotaging the instruments to achieve it, who selectively indignant, with the punctuality of a script.

Let this not be a year for the cowards and apostates of our house, who reject a freedom they do not even know the value of.