At the narrow throat where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden, Italy has chosen urgency over consensus, dispatching warships to the Bab al-Mandeb strait without waiting for the European Union's deliberative machinery to reach agreement. Rome's defence minister, Guido Crosetto, has framed the decision as a matter of economic survival: with Iran already commanding the Strait of Hormuz and Houthi forces now holding Yemen's entire western Red Sea coast, the world's remaining arteries for Gulf oil and global container trade are narrowing to a dangerous few. The move raises an older, unresolved ques