L'Italie et l'escalade de la guerre au Vietnam

The purpose of this paper is to assess the Italian reactions to the escalation of the Vietnam War, as well as the impact of the war on US-Italian relations, on Italian foreign policy, and on the evolution of Italian domestic politics. The essay first looks at how the war in Vietnam became an issue in Italy’s domestic politics, and describes the coincidence between the escalation and the growing internal discontent with the experiment of the Center-Left. In the following section, the essay shows how the Italian preoccupations about the war were interrelated to a number of other foreign policy concerns, which seriously troubled the Italian foreign policy-making elite in the second half of the 1960’s. All these domestic and international anxieties spurred a series of Italian attempts to bring about a negotiated settlement of the conflict, from the botched trip to Hanoi of Florence Mayor Giorgio La Pira to the tangled webs of Marigold and Killy, which are explored in the last section of the paper.