The state of the Nato/US alliance in Italy:

In merde profondo. Or in English:

The Financial Times reports that Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned Wednesday after he failed, in the words of the Times, "to persuade communists and other radical leftists in his coalition to support two cornerstones of Italian foreign and security policy. These were Mr Prodi’s determination to keep Italian troops side by side with Nato forces in Afghanistan and his decision to permit the expansion of a US military base in the north-eastern city of Vicenza."

While this would seem to be bad news for the United States (and Nato), it could be even worse news for Italy. As the New York Times' Ian Fisher reports:

[T]he government’s collapse also reflected its own inherent weaknesses, possibly signaling that Italy’s chronic political instability may be coming out of remission. In a nation that has had some 60 governments since World War II, Mr. Prodi has presided uneasily over a coalition of nine diverse parties, ranging from moderate Catholics to Communists.

Update: The Financial Times adds this perspective to the story:

Mr [Giulio] Andreotti, who was prime minister seven times and is now a senator for life, says he found petty and unacceptable the government’s insistence that its foreign policy differed from that of Mr Berlusconi.

“I would have been inclined to vote for the government, but this position of always having to reduce everything to being either for or against Berlusconi seems to me really absurd,” he adds.