Alessandro Brogi's Confronting America presents an exhaustively researched and masterful account of the two-way traffic between the United States and West European (Italian and French) Communism from the end of World War II until the 1980s. This is a work about anti-Americanism and soft diplomacy in which Brogi documents U.S. efforts to fight French and Italian Communism and influence politics in both countries. His work is more complicated than traditional diplomatic histories in that he does not examine the dealings between two governments. Instead, he looks at the interactions between one government and two political parties that were, for the most part, not in power.
The struggle between the Western and Eastern alliances serves as the book's tension, and Brogi devotes more attention to the dynamics of the Communist camp than to the Western. Washington's alliance was more intricate than Moscow's. U.S. allies, such as the Italian Christian Democrats and,...