Ciano, as he faced execution in the winter of 1943–4 for voting against his father-in-law at the Grand Council meeting that provoked the regime's fall, saw a truth of sorts. The very magnitude of Mussolini's aspirations had brought disaster. “One man,” Ciano wrote in his farewell letter to the King in December 1943, “one man alone, Mussolini, through unscrupulous personal ambitions, ‘out of thirst for military glory’ (to use his own actual words) ha[d] deliberately led the nation into the bottomless pit.”

While Mussolini had far more help than Ciano's reiteration of Churchill's shrewd propaganda implied, and “thirst for military glory” scarcely did the dictator's motivations justice, Ciano was clearly right in proclaiming Mussolini's preeminent responsibility for what had occurred. Mussolini had a genuine foreign policy program: the creation of an Italian spazio vitale in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Success would have raised Italy at last to the status of a true great power, a goal Mussolini shared with the Italian establishment, although the latter, like the generals and admirals, lacked his taste for risk. Internally, expansion would consolidate Fascist power, eliminate ball competing authorities and unwelcome restraints, and mold the Italians into a people “worthy” of the imperial mission Mussolini claimed for them.

Italy's catastrophic defeat in its “parallel war” and the ultimate destruction of Grossdeutschland in the wider conflict fortunately deprived Mussolini of the opportunity to implement his program.