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Washington could provide sizable economic aid to European countries with growing Communist movements, to bolster existing regimes and help create strong economies that would lessen the Communists' appeal. Beyond this, however, there seems little the U.S. can do. Military intervention is out of the question so long as the Communists act legally. Any excessively muscular U.S. action runs the risk of a backlash, arousing popular sympathy for the Communists, because they would appear to be bullied by the Americans.
Action by Common Market states might be far more effective. Christoph Bertram, director of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, suggests that tough political conditions could be attached to continued EEC support for the Italian economy—with an understanding that the present government, which excludes the Communists, stay in office until the next elections. Because of the vital importance of the Common Market to Italy's future, Bertram feels the impact of such conditions would be much more effective than any U.S. threats to read Italy out of NATO. Bertram's policy might also be applied to Greece and Spain, both of which hope eventually to gain full membership in the Market.
Beyond that, the established socialist parties of northern Europe could provide moral and financial help for their relatively weak ideological allies in the south—as they have, to some extent, with Mario Scares' Portuguese Socialists. Above all, the ruling non-Communist parties could and should undertake internal reforms to become more appealing to the millions who vote Communist not because of ideology but as protest. These moderates must again demonstrate—as they did after World War II—that they are capable of responding to the aspirations of dissatisfied voters.
If diplomatic, political and economic measures failed to keep Communists out of a Western government, the U.S., and the rest of the West, could isolate that country by cutting off all but minimal economic and diplomatic relations. This, however, might lead to the kind of chaos that would justify the Communists in taking strong authoritarian measures.
A more advisable policy, at least initially, would be one of vigilant tolerance. Risky though it may be, the major Western countries should perhaps not interfere with Communist participation in Western Cabinets, if it comes, but instead give the party a chance to prove that its democratic protestations are genuine. At the same time, however, the West should make it unmistakably clear to the Communist party involved, and to Moscow as well, that any move to establish an authoritarian or pro-Soviet regime would not be tolerated. Appropriately tough action would then follow Burton Pines