In the last column, I referred to the limits of Henry Kissinger's proverbial realism. As we have seen, Hans Morgenthau, the leading theorist of the realist approach to international relations during the Cold War, underlined 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 (PCE), presented that same year in Eurocomunismo y Estado, which ended with a few paragraphs about a speech delivered by Kissinger in December 1975 before of the US ambassadors to Western Europe, in which the Secretary of State had been absolutely opposed to the possibility of communist parties in southern Europe not dependent on the USSR taking part 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 bases military, but the development of nuclear weapons, a factor completely independent of an eventual arrival of the communists in power. The reasons were different. Morgenthau spoke of a demonological interpretation that, without attending to the interests, identified the communists with the forces of evil. Carrillo, of the ideological rejection of the social policies that could be put in place.
When, a few years earlier, Kissinger defended the need to prevent Allende from governing by alluding to the theory of the domino effect, he was thinking above all about the Italian piece. And Enrico Berlinguer, general secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), had this 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 explicitly presented as the product of a reflection on what the coup d'état in Chile had shown in relation to the limits of Italian sovereignty and the possibility of an intervention, covert or not, by the USA in case 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 always it had been talked about as the next piece likely to fall. The PCE was only legalized already with Carter in the presidency and Kissinger out of the Secretary of State. As for Italy, Kissinger did not make any gesture that was not a deterrent to the scenario of historic engagement. Instead, in October 1975 he opened the doors of the National Security Council to Giorgio Almirante, the leader of the neo-fascist MSI, from whom the Brothers of Italy, by Giorgia Meloni, descend. Some stories of the Atlanticist European extreme right, which are now being talked about as if they were a novelty, begin then. To be continued .
