Sinistra europea e relazioni interatlantiche nei primi anni settanta: ideologia e politica

The ideological side of the Cold War was significantly modified through the markedly “realist” perception of U.S. national interest on the part of the Nixon administration , even though much of the public wording might occasionally sound mostly unaltered. Such primary goals as restoring the world dollar standard, ensuring exclusive control of the Middle East, and limiting the need to seek multilateral arrangements, largely overruled whatever might be seen as widening the effectiveness of democratic values and polities worldwide. That might explain why Nixon’s and Kissinger’s Washington occasionally showed to appreciate Soviet conservative hard-bargainers as being more comfortable partners with respect to both some Western European allies―including the German socialists―and whatever kind of reformist attitudes inside the communist world itself. Particularly, that might also explain why the outspoken embracement of western values and polities by the Italian communists was perceived as a threat rather than an opportunity. The term “socialist” occurred to be used as an ideologically-shaped way to summarize the kind of developments that should be prevented in view of the U.S. national interest―whereas no further extension of the Leninist-modeled political system to Western Europe was ever thought to represent any realistic danger.