ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Andrew Buchanan argues that US policy towards Italy from the end of World War I to the early Cold War demonstrates remarkable continuities, and he highlights key thematic elements that tie together the seemingly discrete moments of pre-war, war and post-war. Throughout this period, US policymakers, diplomats, soldiers and propagandists sought to integrate Italy as a junior partner in a new American-led world system. Scholars have long noted Mussolini’s popularity among American elites, but this chapter shows how that positive appreciation was tied both to efforts to keep Italy out of the war and to initial US planning for the post-war that proposed organizing a kind of ‘fascism lite’. Even after the intervention of the Italian people blocked this prospect in fall 1943, successful US efforts to liberalize the Italian government, carried out with the help of Moscow and the Italian Communist Party, were designed to accomplish the same fundamental goals. American military power, political dexterity and economic aid and investment ensured that as the contours of post-war Italy began to take shape from summer 1944 on, they did so within the framework of Washington’s new hegemonic authority. This relationship was reinforced by forceful American economic and political intervention in the early years of the Cold War and by the integration of Italy into the US-led military architecture in Western Europe and the Mediterranean.
