In the previous column, I referred to the limits of Henry Kissinger's proverbial realism. As we saw, Hans Morgenthau, the main theorist of the realist approach to international relations during the Cold War, highlighted these limitations in a 1977 article entitled The pathology of American power. Curiously, his arguments coincided with those that Santiago Carrillo, general secretary of the Communist Party of Spain, presented that same year in Eurocomunismo y Estado, which ended with a few paragraphs about a speech given by Kissinger in December 1975 before the US ambassadors. - in Western Europe, where the Secretary of State had absolutely opposed the possibility of European communist parties not dependent on the USSR participating in a government. Like Morgenthau, Carrillo pointed out that this opposition did not depend on the realist doctrine of the balance of power because, in accordance with the thesis of “deterrence by terror” assumed by the Americans, this balance was no longer determined by alliances or military bases. , but the development of nuclear weapons, a factor entirely independent of an eventual arrival of the communists to power. The reasons were other. Morgenthau spoke of a demonological interpretation that, without taking into account interests, identified communists with the forces of evil. Carrillo, of the ideological rejection of the social policies that could be implemented.
When, a few years earlier, Kissinger defended preventing Allende from governing by alluding to the theory of the domino effect, he was thinking above all of the Italian piece. And Enrico Berlinguer, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party, had this very much in mind when, after the Eurocommunist turn of his formation, he proposed the famous “historic compromise” (in fact, a grand coalition with the Christian Democrats), which he explicitly presented as the product of a reflection on what the Chilean coup had shown about the limits of Italian sovereignty and the possibility of intervention, covert or not, by the US if it won the elections. After the carnation revolution in Portugal (April 1974) and the death of Franco (November 1975), which opened the door to a transition, the debate was no longer limited to Italy and France, which were spoken of as the next piece likely to fall. The PCE was only legalized with Carter in the presidency and Kissinger out of the Secretary of State. As for Italy, Kissinger did not make any gesture that would not dissuade the scenario of historic compromise. Instead, in October 1975, he opened the doors of the National Security Council to Giorgio Almirante, the leader of the neo-fascist MSI, from which Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy are descended. Some stories of the Atlanticist European extreme right, which is talked about so much now as if it were new, begin then. To be continue.
