Middle East, fight against terrorism, G20, Italy-US relations. The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Rome with a full schedule of commitments, for a three-day trip to Italy in the name of the renewed activism of the Biden administration across the Atlantic and on global issues. Today the head of American diplomacy is planning a breakfast with Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio at Villa Madama. In the evening he will see the new Israeli foreign minister, Yair Lapid, in the first face to face between the new post-Netanyahu government and the US administration (Lapid will also see Di Maio and his colleague from Bahrain, a country that signed the Abrahamic Agreements with Israel together with the Emirates).
Tomorrow morning Blinken will be received by Pope Francis, then he will co-chair with Di Maio the meeting of the anti-Isis Coalition at the new Rome fair: it will be the first time that Italy has hosted a meeting of the Coalition, two years after the last appointment in Washington.
Blinken will close in Matera on Tuesday participating in the G20 Foreign Affairs, under the Italian presidency. The Italian agenda is based on three pillars of action: people, planet, prosperity. And therefore the international response to the pandemic, the rapid recovery of the world economy based on the needs of the people, the most vulnerable, women and young people, and sustainable development to protect climate stability. Goals that Rome wants to achieve with a renewed multilateralism, also being able to count on the new approach of the Biden administration that has abandoned the isolationism of the Trump era.