Throughout the occupation and early postwar period, American attempts to promote and guide Italian economic recovery had been hindered by bureaucratic and ideological disunity within the foreign policy community. Those conflicts tended to produce contradictory policies toward Italy, policies, moreover, that lacked the financial leverage to make U.S. influence felt in a sustained and effective way. Those essentially American problems had not disappeared by the spring of 1948. Congress had forced the State Department to relinquish control of its brainchild, the ERP, to a new, specially created agency, the Economic Cooperation Administration. The ERP's proper relationship to the department's latest initiative – the creation of an Atlantic security system – would soon perplex and trouble such officials as George Kennan. These continuing difficulties notwithstanding, the American executive had achieved an unprecedented degree of internal consensus by mid-1948, based on the twin tenets of anticommunism and massive foreign aid. The New Deal and Hullian idealism of earlier days had given way to a more sober reassessment of U.S. capabilities and European needs. At the same time, thanks to the Truman administration's relentless public campaign, the U.S. Congress and people had authorized an undreamed of financial commitment to European economic recovery. The years 1948–49 marked the high noon of bipartisan foreign policy.

From the standpoint of U.S. strategic interests newly defined to include the Mediterranean basin, America's Italian policy had achieved a hardly negligible success.