I think we played the best we could with the hand we were dealt. Most of our historical trajectory has been decided by geography, this was also true for most countries until recent times.

If you look at our territory, it doesn't have much resources that would have been relevant during the period that France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, the UK etc have established themselves as great powers. Sure, we have some oil and some natural gas, ores, uranium and a bunch of other things that would only become relevant in 19th century and would have been useless before that.

Another aspect of our territory is the fact that even though we have a massive mountain range in the middle of the country, there are mostly no natural barriers between us and our neighbours (maybe the Danube but even the Romans crossed it in war). This is not an issue nowadays but for most of our history we were surrounded by very powerful empires that have invaded us more than once... (The Ottomans, the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary).

From a more global perspective, we do have sea-access! It's nice for commerce but it would have been pointless for us to try becoming a formidable naval force, again because of geography just not ours in this case. Nowadays the strait of Bosforus is governed by the principles of the Montreaux convention, meaning that all nations with territory at Black Sea hold a right of transit/passage as that's the only way that connects the black sea to the planetary ocean. But this was not always the case, prior to the convention it was up to Turkey to set up whatever rules they wanted as it was their strait - that means that building a huge navy would have been pointless, as the ability to "project power" outside the region would have depended on turkeys approval =)).

Now look at those other romance countries. Spain and Portugal got along pretty well for most of history. They have the pyrenees to separate and protect them from France and the rest of their nation was surrounded by water. Italy had the Alps to protect them against their rivals on the continent. France was protected by mountains on the south and by the atlantic coast on its eastern and northern sides, acting as a pretty good barrier between them and the UK. They also all had good natural ports and harbors on their coasts, granting them a good headstart as naval powers/trade giants. This is not to say that they lived peacefully inside their territories thanks to these barriers - they did go to war, A LOT, against direct neighbours and other european powers, they were just not under a constant threat of invasion.