The last two months of 1917 were undoubtedly the hardest period of the whole war for Italy. The defeat of Caporetto, the loss of Friuli and of eastern Veneto, the flight of the civilian population and the insecurity of the new front were still open wounds. Besides these problems, there were also two other very important political issues, a national issue as well as an international one.
Popular protests on the first point showed a marked increase. These manifestations had already started in the summer of 1917 and were often repressed by violence and blood. The reasons behind these strikes and marches were different: from the lack of raw materials to poverty that affected a very large number of rural families up to the prolonged absence of men who were deployed at the front. After the defeat of Caporetto things became steadily even worse: patriotic propaganda was unable to stop the mood of pessimism from spreading. With their husbands or their sons away at the front, many women would admit that they would prefer to see Austria-Hungary win the war so that their loved ones would come back home. Many farmers from Lombardy instead waited for "the arrival of the Austrians, convinced that they would have helped the poor." (Mark Thompson, La Guerra Bianca, Il Saggiatore, Milan, 2009, page 353).
Manifestations of this type worried the government of Orlando up to a certain point. Of much greater alarm were the two international political events that followed each other between the end of 1917 and the start of 1918: the revelation of the secret agreements of the Treaty of London by Soviet Russia and the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson, President of the USA (08th January).
When the world came to know about what had been agreed between Italy and members of the Triple Agreement three years earlier, the motivations behind Italy's participation in the war were put in serious doubt. Up till then propaganda was concentrated on a patriotic war that should have concluded the process of Italian unification (the Risorgimento) with the annexation of Trento and Trieste. From that moment, however, it became clear to everybody that the Italian claims went far beyond the frontiers of the unredeemed territories: in Istria the number of Italian civilians was low while in Dalmatia, Alto Adige and in the valley of Isonzo north of Gorizia they were practically inexistent. The request for the Greek and Turkish islands of Dodecanese revealed instead clear imperialist intentions.
Besides this problem, there was also another issue that involved the United States. The American President Wilson delivered to Senate a famous speech (that was divided in fourteen points) that marked the future of international relations. He criticized imperialist and colonial policies and stood in favour of people who demanded the right to self-determination.
In this way, if the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been dissolved at the end of the war, the United States would have supported the birth of new nations including Yugoslavia and would de facto have exercised the right to veto Italy's requests for Istria and Dalmatia.
