Gas Pipelines, F-35s and the Mattei Plan: Italy Is Playing Its Mediterranean Hand With Unusual Seriousness
From Eni’s €24 Billion African Energy Push to F-35s and GCAP, Italy Is Quietly Assembling the Architecture of Regional Dominance.
The question would have seemed faintly absurd ten years ago. Italy: the country of chronic governments, stalled reforms and a Calimero complex so deep it had been given its own name. A superpower? In the Mediterranean?
And yet the pieces being assembled in Rome right now, across energy, defence, diplomacy and industrial policy, tell a story that deserves to be taken seriously.
The Energy Play: Italy as Europe’s Southern Hub
The most consequential transformation is the one that receives the least attention in the English-language press. Italy has repositioned itself, with remarkable speed, from a country dangerously dependent on Russian gas to the primary conduit between African energy production and European consumption.
Eni, Italy’s state-backed energy giant, is investing €24 billion over four years in Algeria, Libya and Egypt, approximately €8 billion in each country. The goal is to expand hydrocarbon production that can flow north through Italy into the European grid, positioning Rome as the indispensable intermediary between Africa’s reserves and Europe’s demand.
In July 2025 alone, Eni and Algeria’s Sonatrach signed a $1.3 billion thirty-year development contract to explore and develop hydrocarbon fields in the Zemourt El Kbar area, locking Algeria as the cornerstone of Italy’s long-term diversification strategy. By 2023, Russian gas had already fallen to less than 5 percent of Italy’s intake, replaced by flows from Algeria, Azerbaijan and LNG imports.
The investment coincides with the Italian government’s Mattei Plan, named after Eni’s legendary first chairman Enrico Mattei, who pioneered Italy’s post-war energy independence through partnerships with producing nations rather than the Anglo-American majors. Meloni’s version of the plan frames Italy’s relationship with Africa as a partnership rather than an aid relationship, with energy at its commercial core.
The infrastructure being built to carry all of this gas is Italian. The Greenstream pipeline connecting Libya to Sicily, the TransMed connecting Algeria via Tunisia to Italy, the proposed GALSI pipeline connecting Algeria to Sardinia: these are not pipelines that pass through Italy. They terminate in Italy. Europe’s gas flows through Rome.
The Military Dimension
Italy’s 2025 defence budget reached €31.2 billion, a 7.2 percent increase on the previous year, and has been reformatted to reach NATO’s 2 percent of GDP threshold by including pension payments and the Carabinieri in the ledger. The country has signed up to NATO’s new 5 percent by 2035 pledge, covering 3.5 percent core defence spending and 1.5 percent defence-related expenditure.
The hardware being acquired tells its own story. Italy has committed to 90 F-35 aircraft, with the first Italian-built F-35B from the Cameri FACO factory delivered to the Italian Navy in March 2026. The country is a core partner in GCAP, the sixth-generation fighter programme being developed jointly with the UK and Japan. A new programme for U212 NFS submarines has been approved. New Leopard 2A8 main battle tanks are in prototype and testing phase. The SAMP/T NG air defence system is scheduled for initial deployment in 2026.
Strategically, Italian defence operates on two parallel tracks: full integration within NATO’s deterrence posture against Russia on the eastern flank, and a distinct Mediterranean identity that positions Italy as the primary NATO power in the enlarged Mediterranean, from Gibraltar to the Red Sea. Missions in Lebanon, Iraq, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa confirm that the footprint is already substantial.
Italian frigates are deployed under Operation Aspides in the Red Sea, regularly intercepting Houthi drones and missiles. Italy leads the EU’s Operation Irini, enforcing the Libya arms embargo. It contributes the largest contingent to UNIFIL in southern Lebanon and is pushing to lead any future international mission there when the current mandate expires.
Does Italy Sell Its Force?
Yes, and increasingly systematically. Italy’s defence exports have grown steadily under the Meloni government, with Leonardo, Fincantieri and Beretta among the principal beneficiaries of a government that has actively supported arms sales as an instrument of foreign policy influence. Fincantieri has sold frigates and patrol vessels across the Middle East, Southeast Asia and North Africa. Leonardo’s helicopters and aircraft are present in over forty countries. The Cameri FACO facility, which assembles F-35 components for Italy and maintenance for multiple European air forces, has made Italy a node in the global F-35 supply chain.
Italy’s defence policy explicitly aims to reinforce its military and diplomatic presence across the enlarged Mediterranean as a vital area for energy security, trade routes and regional stability. The defence industry is the commercial arm of that ambition. Dagens
What the Mattei Plan Actually Is
The Piano Mattei is simultaneously a strategic doctrine, a branding exercise and a genuine policy framework. Its core proposition is that Italy can offer African countries something the former colonial powers cannot: partnership without historical guilt, investment without political strings, and a model of economic cooperation oriented toward African development rather than European extraction.
In practice it focuses on six pillars: energy, agriculture, health, education, water and infrastructure. The energy pillar, where Eni does the heavy lifting, is the most advanced. The others are at earlier stages. Critics argue that the plan is essentially Eni’s investment programme dressed in diplomatic language. Supporters counter that the combination of commercial investment with genuine development cooperation is precisely what distinguishes it from Chinese Belt and Road logic on one side and European aid conditionality on the other.
The Honest Assessment
Italy is not a superpower and will not become one. Its military is capable and increasingly well-equipped but remains constrained by budget pressures, demographic challenges in recruitment, and an institutional culture that is, as analysts have noted, more reactive than visionary. The Calimero complex is real and does not disappear simply because defence spending is rising.
What Italy is becoming, more credibly than at any point since the postwar period, is a serious regional power with a coherent strategy for the Mediterranean and Africa, the financial instruments to pursue it through Eni, the military presence to give it weight, and a government with the political will to frame it explicitly as a national project.
That is not a superpower. It is something more interesting: a country that has identified its specific strategic geography and is, for once, playing it deliberately.
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