Kaeten Mistry's The United States, Italy, and the Origins of Cold War demonstrates the utility of bilateral studies, even as it illustrates the challenge of producing such work, in which the search for useful context – where along the relational axis a scholar chooses to plant his or her analytical flag – can be elusive. Mistry's work tilts toward the Washington pole in its focus on the Cold War phenomenon known as “political warfare,” and thereby demonstrates that there is still much to be learned from the approach.

Mistry locates political warfare in the context of deep apprehension over the Italian elections of 1948. The February coup in Czechoslovakia elevated fears of communist takeover throughout Europe, intensifying the stakes of the elections. Communist success in Italy – where the Partito comunista italiano (PCI) was particularly strong – might embolden communist forces in Germany and elsewhere. Italy thus became the site of a pivotal showdown. Employing what became known as “political warfare,” the Americans helped to establish the Christian Democrat Alcide de Gasperi as the dominant Italian political figure of his day. American officials would thus set a precedent for a generation's worth of international Cold War activism.

Political warfare is defined here, in George Kennan's words, as “the employment of all the means at a nation's command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives” (3). Kennan's idea embraced both overt and covert means, including economic diplomacy, propaganda, psychological warfare, manipulation of local intermediaries, and more. Mistry does not attempt to disentangle why we should prefer Kennan's terminology over the seemingly more inclusive “public diplomacy.”

Several important themes emerge. First, Mistry uncovers the public–private networks, especially surrounding labor, that largely structured the American century. Second are the political fortunes of De Gasperi's Democrazia Cristiana (DC), which were linked to American support via political warfare. The DC emerged as a major Italian political force significantly because of American support, public and private. Finally, Mistry shows how the apparent success of American political warfare in 1948 conditioned policymakers to overestimate their power, tragically gilding the path that would lead to Vietnam.

Mistry's isolation of political warfare as a strategy does give rise to questions. First, Mistry provides some political context into which to set his Washington-centric account of political warfare. However, readers who may be expecting deep analysis of Italian culture and politics as a way to diagnose the penetrative success of American culture – i.e. “Americanization” – will have to look elsewhere. This is a diplomatic history, with Italy as the trigger that gives rise to American political warfare as a strategy. Second, Mistry's analysis of political warfare operations is partially crippled by the sometimes inclusion of CIA activities, which are part of political warfare, but precluded from Mistry's analysis because of limited access to archival records (135). Third, it is never quite clear where we should locate the Marshall Plan in the development of political warfare. Mistry's periodization overlaps, but does not fully embrace, the plan, and he leaves the analysis of US economic aid in Italy to other authors. Yet clearly the Marshall Plan encapsulated all the political and psychological effects which Kennan sought.

Worthy of greater examination is the relation of De Gasperi and the DC to American power. Mistry notes De Gasperi's courting of American support, but also the DC's selective distancing from Washington, leading him to conclude that “American policy was being shaped by indigenous currents rather than imposing itself on the local scene” (165). But this stress on the “agency of local actors” (179) is one of the limitations of Mistry's Washington-centric approach. American political warfare was not merely a two-dimensional aid to De Gasperi, which he could either accept or deflect for his own electoral ends. American power was also capable of shaping the broader political and geopolitical environments in which the DC operated. The Americans promoted the DC in a number of ways, including extending the private networks that roused popular support for the party, infiltrating the party's presumed labor opposition, feting its personalities, propagandizing its supporters, waging psychological warfare against its opponents, and galvanizing émigré support from across the waters. But American power also enveloped adherents and opponents in an economic climate that invigorated DC ideology and supported with direct aid the country's economic fortunes during the party's reign. It helped to create a geostrategic climate in which the DC fit naturally at the center of postwar Italian politics. And all of this before private American actors, including Hollywood, worked their magic in Italy. Mistry's Washington-centric polarity misses the fullness of the imperial landscape.

This may be asking a bit too much for one monograph, but without these broader contexts for political warfare, it is difficult to assess its impact within Italy or its relative value as one tool of American foreign-policymaking. Nevertheless, for understanding the rapidly evolving strategic vision of postwar American planners, including the revolutionary commitment of policymakers to a new global US posture, and for deep understanding of one part of the American imperial repertoire, Mistry has produced a very fine book.