The Godfather Doctrine

A Foreign Policy Parable

John C. Hulsman, A. Wess Mitchell

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400829859
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

The Godfather Doctrine draws clear and essential lessons from perhaps the greatest Hollywood movie ever made to illustrate America's changing geopolitical place in the world and how our country can best meet the momentous strategic challenges it faces.
In the movie The Godfather, Don Corleone, head of New York's most powerful organized-crime family, is shockingly gunned down in broad daylight, leaving his sons Sonny and Michael, along with his adopted son, consigliere Tom Hagen, to chart a new course for the family. In The Godfather Doctrine, John Hulsman and Wess Mitchell show how the aging and wounded don is emblematic of cold-war American power on the decline in a new world where our enemies play by unfamiliar rules, and how the don's heirs uncannily exemplify the three leading schools of American foreign policy today. Tom, the left-of-center liberal institutionalist, thinks the old rules still apply and that negotiation is the answer. Sonny is the Bush-era neocon who shoots first and asks questions later, proving an easy target for his enemies. Only Michael, the realist, has a sure feel for the changing scene, recognizing the need for flexible combinations of soft and hard power to keep the family strong and maintain its influence and security in a dangerous and rapidly changing world.
Based on Hulsman and Mitchell's groundbreaking and widely debated article, "Pax Corleone, " The Godfather Doctrine explains for everyone why Francis Ford Coppola's epic story about a Mafia dynasty holds key insights for ensuring America's survival in the twenty-first century.

The Godfather Doctrine

The Godfather and American Foreign Policy

The Don, alone, walks across the street to pick some fruit from the stand. He mumbles pleasantly to the Chinese owner, then turns his skilled attention to the task. However, his peaceful idyll is shattered by the sounds of running feet and multiple gunshots. Vito Corleone, head of the most powerful of New York’s organized crime families, lies slumped over his car, with five bullet holes in his body.

Virgil “the Turk” Sollozzo arranged the hit on Vito, as the Don refused to ally with him in expanding into the very lucrative narcotics trade. By a miracle, he is not dead, only gravely wounded. His three sons, Santino (Sonny), Tom Hagen, and Michael, gather in an atmosphere of shock and panic to try to decide what to do next, with the towering figure of the Don looming over them all. For the Godfather was more than just the most successful mafioso of his era; he has come to epitomize a power structure that has stood the test of time. All that has been imperiled, along with the Don’s dwindling life.

This, of course, is the hinge of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, one of the greatest movies ever produced by American cinema. The Godfather has always been a joy to watch; however, given the present changes in the world’s power structure, the movie becomes a startlingly useful metaphor for the strategic problems of our times. The aging Vito Corleone, emblematic of Cold War American power, is struck down suddenly and violently by forces he did not expect and does not understand, much as America was on September 11th. Even more intriguingly, each of his three sons embraces a very different vision of how the family should move forward following this wrenching moment. The sons approximate the three American foreign policy schools of thought—liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism, and realism—vying for control in today’s disarranged world order. While we certainly accept that analogies have their limits, taking a fresh look at The Godfather, and the positions of the three quarreling sons, casts an illuminating spotlight on the American foreign policy debates that rage today.

The Consigliere

As Vito’s three sons gather, the future of the Corleone dynasty hangs in the balance. The first brother the family turns to for advice is Tom Hagen, the German-Irish transplant who serves as “consigliere” (chief legal adviser) to the clan. Though an adopted son, Tom is the most familiar of the three brothers with the inner workings of the New York crime world. As family lawyer and diplomat, he is responsible for navigating the complex network of street alliances, backroom treaties, and political favors that surround and sustain the family empire. His view of the Sollozzo threat and how the family should respond to it is an outgrowth of a legal-diplomatic worldview that shares a number of philosophical similarities with the liberal institutionalism dominating the foreign policy outlook of today’s Democratic Party.

Liberal institutionalism found its modern prophet in Woodrow Wilson, the vainglorious president who pledged fighting a war to end war itself. Along with this messianic disregard for history as it has been lived, its key features include a core conviction that rules can be used to trump power, and a corresponding predilection for using international institutions to tackle global problems. But liberal institutionalism goes beyond this, seeing such organizations as the United Nations as being endowed with a unique global legitimacy, as if the institutions themselves were the critical players on the chessboard, with states playing an important but secondary role. As such, nations must give up a significant portion of their sovereignty in order to endow such clubs with power. In a similar way, Tom believes that by relinquishing their individual freedom of maneuver and seeking consensus at the meetings of the Five Families (a kind of UN Security Council), local Mafia clans can cast off their thuggish beginnings and replace the rough-and-tumble world of gangland geopolitics with a cooperative framework for jointly governing the streets of New York.

It is with this larger goal in mind that he assesses the Sollozzo threat. Like many modern Democrats, Tom believes that the family’s main objective should be to return as quickly as possible to the world as it existed before the attack. His overriding strategic aim is the one that Hillary Clinton had in mind when she wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs article of the need for America to “reclaim our proper place in the world.” The “proper place” Tom wants to reclaim is a mirror image of the one that American politicians remember from the 1990s and dream of restoring after 2008. Like pre-September 11th America, the empire that Vito built in the years leading up to the Sollozzo attack was a “benign hegemon”—a sole Mafia superpower that ruled not by conquest, but by institutions and strategic restraint.

This is the system that Tom, in his role as consigliere, was responsible for maintaining. By sharing access to the policemen, judges, and senators that (as Sollozzo puts it) the Don “carries in his pocket like so many nickels and dimes,” the family managed to create a kind of Sicilian Bretton Woods—a system of political and economic public goods that benefited not only the Corleones, but the entire Mafia community. This willingness to let the other crime syndicates “drink from the well” of Corleone political influence rendered the Don’s disproportionate accumulation of power more palatable to the other families, who were less inclined to form a countervailing coalition against it. The result was a consensual, rules-based order that offered many of the same benefits—low transaction costs of rule, less likelihood of great-power war, and the chance to make money under an institutional umbrella—that America enjoyed during the Cold War.

It is this “Pax Corleone” that Sollozzo, in Tom’s eyes, must not be allowed to disrupt. In dealing with the new challenger, however, Tom believes that the brothers must be careful not to do anything that would damage the family business. The way to handle Sollozzo, he judges, is not through force but through negotiation—a second trait linking him to today’s liberal institutionalists. Like more than one of the recent ...