Confronting America

Among the numerous vital issues that American leaders faced at the end of World War II—the occupations of Germany and Japan, relations among the members of the Grand Alliance, economic reconstruction, and postwar borders—was the problem posed by the indigenous Left in Western Europe. This challenge was most acute in France and Italy where well-organized and popular Communist parties contested for power within both nations and against the growing influence of the United States in European affairs. Alessandro Brogi examines the nature and resilience of the French and Italian communists’ appeal throughout the Cold War and “how effectively the United States countered it by selecting among America’s various economic, diplomatic, cultural, and covert options” (p. 5). Confronting America, based on extensive research in newly opened communist archives in France and Italy as well as U.S. government sources, is the finest study of the political and cultural Cold War waged in western Europe between local communists, who made anti-Americanism a central component of their political agenda, and the United States. As Brogi argues, Western Communism, even more than the Eastern, Soviet brand of communism, compelled U.S. policymakers, diplomats, and influential intellectuals to reconsider the image America projected abroad, and even to ponder the general meaning of American liberal capitalist culture and ideology. (p. 4

Alliance · Communism · Economic history · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · World War II · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law

• Le partisan et l’académique. Retour sur le Traité marxiste d’économie politique, 1971

  Massimo Asta•Histoire Politique•2022

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