page 2 The East-West Dimension in the Mediterranean Although always on the fringes of Western allied security concerns, it was of course in the Mediterranean that the communist menace in Greece led to the 1947 Truman Doctrine and eventually the creation of the "Western bloc" and the Atlantic Alliance itself. [...] The limited significance of the Mediterranean to the Soviets is confirmed by the fact that the only real East-West crisis in the region in recent years was during the October, 1973 war, when Moscow backed down in the face of an American global alert. [...] Perhaps one of the most acute signals of the relative weakness of the Soviet Union in the Mediterranean and the basic strenth of the United States and NATO is the fact that the Western Alliance can tolerate the puerile foreign policy posturing and antics of Andreas Papandreau's Greece and the recurrent clashes of Greece and Turkey without any significant weakenening of the Alliance position in the. [...] Moreover, the absolute pragmatism and unevenness which govern allied cooperation in the Southern Flank, in the absence of even a modicum of institutionalization and fairness (that is, sticking to the rules of the game), is detrimental to the effectiveness of allied policies in the area, not to speak about inter-allied relations. [...] The incidents in the Gulf of Sidra and the bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in the first months of 1986, after Libya had been identified by Washington as the sponsor of the attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985 and other terrorist acts in the following months, led to similar consequences in the relationship between i taly and the Usa.
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