The Italian stance towards a "Third Europe" or "Horizontal Axis", the idea of a power bloc in Eastern Europe that rejected both German and Soviet influence, was not necessarily negative. It was this ambivalence in Italian foreign policy that initially hindered a full Italian alignment with Germany. By 1937, the Italian interest in the pact had changed, as the Mussolini administration desired to have its own military alliance with Japan and felt that accession to the agreement would be the easiest way to forge the triangular alliance with Germany and Japan that the Italian government desired. Ciano commented in his diary on 2 November 1937 that the pact, while anti-communist in name, was instead 'clearly anti-British'. The protocol of Italy's entry was signed on 6 November 1937. It should be pointed out that, as a result of the phrasing of the treaty, Italy was, from a purely legal argument, required to only adhere to the main text and the public supplementary protocol, but not to the secret protocol that had the specific military directives against the Soviet Union. In reaction to the Italian accession to the pact, the British government saw the traditional British dominance in the Mediterranean (Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Egypt (Suez Canal)) threatened by a potentially resurgent Italy backed with German industrial and military power. Robert Vansittart, a prominent critic of the British Appeasement policy under Neville Chamberlain, warned that Italy, with its recent acquisitions in the war against Ethiopia, threatened a pincer movement against Egypt and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and that Mussolini, due to his personality, could not be deterred even by Italy's economic instability from a potential military adventure against the United Kingdom. After the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact and especially after Italy's entry, Ribbentrop continued his efforts to form it into a full military alliance. This mirrored the thoughts of Ribbentrop, Raumer, Ōshima and Hitler during the treaty's creation, as the original draft that Hitler signed off on in Bayreuth had likely included military terms that were explicitly both defensive as well as offensive. This was prevented by the intervention of Japanese diplomats around Shigenori Tōgō. After the pact's conclusion, Ribbentrop's efforts to transform it into a military alliance continued, although his agenda was driven by the concern of war against the western allies, whereas Hitler's main primary concern had been to eliminate the Soviet Union. Ribbentrop in his function as German ambassador to the United Kingdom recommended to Hitler in his report of 28 December 1937 and his final conclusions of 2 January 1938 the creation of a strong anti-British alliance with the ability to threaten the United Kingdom in a way that would either compel it to stay neutral or in the case of war be able to defeat it.