The military intervention in Iraq by the United States (US), supported
militarily by Great Britain and politically by a “coalition of the willing,”
which included a large number of current and future European
Union (EU) members but not Germany and France, was undoubtedly
the major foreign policy event of the year. It generated much debate
on concepts such as immediate threat, pre-emptive war, unilateralism,
and multilateralism, as well as on the question of whether the
US, as the sole superpower, has the responsibility to act as a security
provider of last resort when multilateral organizations devoted to this
task become paralyzed. The intervention divided not only the permanent
members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) after
a decade of co-operation but also caused a split in the Atlantic alliance
and among EU members, probably one of the worst to have occurred
on a foreign policy issue in the history of both organizations. Finally,
it put an end—at least temporarily—to that bipartisan consensus in
Italian foreign policy, which had emerged at the end of the 1970s and
consolidated in the 1990s.