Implementing the dictators' visions required foreign policies designed to camouflage aggressive intent while wooing similarly ambitious allies, and armed forces capable of the wide-ranging offensive warfare needed to destroy the international order. Scholars have studied numerous aspects of Italian foreign policy in the Fascist period. But unlike the German case, coherent overviews are rare. Chapter 3 attempts to provide one, organized around an issue that since the 1960s has been thoroughly explored north of the Alps, the nature and extent of the continuities linking the foreign policy of the regime with that of its predecessors. The essay focuses on the restraints under which Mussolini labored, the difficulties encountered in choosing Fascist Italy's first victim, and the search for allies – especially for the vengeful German nationalist ally required to free Italy for Mediterranean domination.

The armed forces and industrial establishment that Mussolini inherited received short shrift in the great war that he found at last in 1940. Chapter 4 charts the nature, extent, and impact of their inadequacies through analysis of the wartime career of the largest and most influential service, the Italian army. Chapter 5, although very different in structure and chronological range, seeks to explain why the outcome in the German case was infinitely more bloody.