Politics & Power Quote by Silvio Berlusconi

Berlusconi’s “On the contrary” is doing as much work as the rest of the sentence. It’s a courtroom pivot, not a meditation: a preemptive rebuttal aimed at critics who cast him as Washington’s pliant ally during the Iraq era. The phrasing is carefully lawyerly - “numerous occasions,” “within my capabilities” - a choreography of responsibility that signals effort while quietly capping accountability. He wants credit for restraint without being pinned to results.

The subtext is a familiar move from leaders in coalition wars: if the outcome was disastrous, they become the voice of caution; if the alliance mattered, they were loyal insiders with access. Berlusconi threads that needle by emphasizing proximity (“convince the American president”) and impotence (“within my capabilities”) in the same breath. It’s a way of preserving status: close enough to whisper in the Oval Office, powerless enough to evade blame when the tanks roll.

Context matters because Italy’s participation in U.S.-led conflicts sat at the intersection of NATO expectations, domestic skepticism, and Berlusconi’s own brand of performative friendship politics. His public image leaned on personal rapport with powerful men; here he repurposes that persona as moral leverage. The line implicitly asks for a revised legacy: judge me by my private cautions, not my public commitments. It’s politics as retroactive conscience, engineered for the historical record as much as for the nightly news.