Recommended : Pax Corleone

The current issue (No.94, Mar/Apr 2008) of The National Interest has a brilliant article entitled “Pax Corleone”, in which the authors use Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather as a metaphor for today’s America. It is well worth reading. For the moment, it can be accessed at The National Interest’s website, at http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=17008, though it will probably be removed in a month or two when the next issue comes out.

In essence, the authors compare America’s 9/11 attack to the hit on the aging Vito Corleone early in the movie. Like todays’s world for America, the Corleone’s world is changing: they are no longer the dominant power, new challengers are arising (China, Russia. India, etc) and new upstarts are causing trouble (Iran, Iraq, North Korea, etc).

In the movie, there is a tense conference after the hit among the three brothers. The authors compare the responses of the three brothers, Tom Hagen (the negotiator, similar to liberal internationalists in the Democratic Party), Sonny (the militant, similar to the neoconservatives in the Republican Party), and Michael (the realist, similar to whom these days on the political scene??).

In the movie, Tom and Sonny both approach the problem blindly with outdated assumptions, assumptions still based in the old days when the Corleones were the unquestioned dominant power, just as America was in the cold-war days. Tom wants to negotiate, not understanding that he no longer negotiates from a position of strength. Sonny wants to retaliate unilaterally, not understanding that this destroys the alliances that have kept the Corleones in power for so long. Michael, on the other hand, sees the nature of the changing order and power realignment and adapts flexibly to it, mixing negotiation with force pragmatically on a case-by-case basis, and working to revise the playing field so that his allies have strong incentives again to support him.

The lessons the authors draw from The Godfather are well worth pondering. It does seem to me that neither the liberal doves nor the militant hawks in today’s American politics have workable approaches, and that it is high time some foreign policy realists re-emerged.