Accepting that international political relations follow a purely business-like pattern exposes one to the real risk that, in some transaction, the buyer or seller finds himself, without even realising it, on the counter or in the catalogue of goods.

If the bargaining is then done with a galaxy of criminal organisations dedicated to migratory or oil racketeering, one cannot be surprised that the contractors of our national security, entrusted with the dirty work, also start to play dirty with the wealthy client, i.e. with us, when they find one who is even more generous or persuasive about the opportunities for profit.

So, in the long-standing State-Mafia negotiation between Italy and Libya, which was initiated in 2017 to stop the landings, we Italians can do everything but be surprised that the price of blackmail and the criminal rank of the blackmailers is soaring.

After entrusting the security of our borders, as the stentorian sovereignist rhetoric goes, to the likes of Bija and Almasri – in Libya, the worst smugglers are coastguard chiefs and the worst criminals are generals – we should not be surprised by the offers of protection from their counterparts in Cyrenaica, which has become Russia’s logistical base in the Mediterranean and the centre of one of the many sordid deals negotiated by Donald Trump with Erdogan and Al Sisi in an anti-European function.

Less still can we be surprised that offers of protection from a criminal gang are made in the mafia style of extortion and preceded by an eloquent threat, such as the one that Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi was made the bearer of, despite himself, when he was rejected in Italy as an unwelcome guest by the scoundrels of General Haftar and his fearsome sons.

International politics unfortunately requires statesmen to associate with bastards of every stripe, but we should be careful that it is they – as Roosevelt said of Somoza – who remain our bastards and not we who become their puppets, which is exactly what Italy (and most of the EU member states), continues to do by leaving the keys of the borders to mercenary allies, willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder, in exchange for a comfortable and pacifistic disengagement from crisis areas that would imply some form of political-strategic activism.

We wanted the full barrel of zero landings and the drunken wife of the boatmen ashore, in exchange for a reasonable fee, while also feeling smart for having turned human trafficking into a more permanent slave-like segregation in the desert galley.

The Kremlin holds a spigot of landings

The result is that we have legitimised and lubricated the launching pads of the migration bombs against Italy and Europe with a flood of money. The Libyan mafias were supposed to stop the fugitives, now to raise the price they threaten to shoot hostages in the North.

The champion of strategic cowardice and anti-humanitarian arrogance, Matteo Salvinihas been saying and repeating for years that the threat to Italy and Europe does not come from the east and Russian tanks, but from the south and illegal migrants. Who knows what he will say now that one of the spigots of the landings – the most threatening – is directly in the hands of the Kremlin, even with Trump’s approval, and that Libya has become the southern front in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and Europe. Which NGO will he pick on this time?