>>508940000 (OP)It's an intelligence gathering project masquerading as a tourism superpower.
It doesn't qualify as a nation anymore, unless you can consider a flytrap as a nation.
We don't have a proper industrial base anymore, because other than a few, we don't need it. Because the purpose of this accidentally beautiful peninsula has radically changed.
We are baiting CEOs, oligarchs and diplomats to flock with their families to get stupefied with wine and the local open air museum atmosphere while conducting affairs and deals on our territory, while being unknowingly eavesdropped by every old woman, cashier, waiter, or outright operative which will sell the information to the highest bidder.
Every once in a while something goes wrong and a few glowniggers sink to the bottom of the lake of Como.
Remember when Yuri Bezmenov spoke about the Soviet treatment of western useful idiots and intellectuals when they got to visit the URSS? How the intelligence assets were specifically tasked with keeping the hosts constantly intoxicated and bombarded with distractions and alcohol, while stripping them naked of any useful information or seeding their minds with ideas beneficial to communists?
We do that. We are that.
Politics are largely irrelevant into this territorial intelligence project, and maintained for mainly cosmetic reasons.