The US government found the “third way” leftism

The bold sections says that the third method used by the US government was leftism or socialism newly associated with abstract expressionism. But, what were the first and second methodss? 1. abstract painting and 2. anti-communism and modern art?

Context:

In the early Cold War, the situation of art and politics in the US was highly complex and has been vigorously debated by art historians. In the 1970s American critics and art historians argued that a politicization of art had also occurred in the US, centered on the government’s use of large-scale American abstract painting of the 1940s and 1950s—that is, the movement known as abstract expressionism. Before this wave of 1970s revisionist scholarship, US art historians seem to have assumed that US abstraction as it was practiced after 1950 retained a status of autonomy and a measure of distance from crude references to explicit political goals that figurative and/or realist art could not. In his 1976 history of abstract expressionism, Irving Sandler described US abstraction
as nothing less than a “triumph.” Nancy Jachec has argued that as the US took up an extreme domestic anti-communism, and modern art became a political target of extremist anti-communists in the US Congress like Joseph McCarthy and Dondero, US art critics, curators, and art institutions defensively recast Marxist or Trotskyite notions of political radicalism that had earlier been associated with avant-garde or abstract painting in New York.
Instead, abstract painting was related to a generalized notion of existentialist cultural dissent, or what Jachec calls “new radicalism.” For a time, the US government found the “third way” leftism or socialism newly associated with abstract expressionism useful in galvanizing US support among the growing, unaligned leftist intelligentsia in Western Europe (mostly in Italy and France), and possibly also in the USSR.