tool name
close“The Godfather Doctrine” lays out an argument for a strategy for American foreign policy by analyzing the situation following the attempted assassination of Vito Corleone in “The Godfather.”
“The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable” by John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell; Princeton University Press; 2009.
The three major Corleone sons (“Poor Fredo”) offered three distinct strategies to deal with the new and dangerous world, one that captured the threats facing a major power in decline.
Sonny, Tom Hagen (the adopted son), and Michael each had distinct visions of how to deal with the Corleone family’s rivals and how to establish a new structure that would bring stability, if not peace, to the Five Families. Hulsman and Mitchell relate the sons’ strategies to the alternatives available to the United States today.
I’d like to make three points about the book. The first is that Hulsman and Mitchell do a nice job of outlining the three brothers’ strategies in dealing with the aftermath of the hit upon Vito, from Sonny’s combative neo-conservatism (“no more meetings, no more discussions… I want Sollozzo — if not, it’s all out war”) to Tom’s “liberal institutionalist” focus on mutual interests (“We oughta hear what they have to say… this is business, not personal”) to Michael’s tactical adaptability (“They wanna have a meeting with me, right? OK… then I’ll kill ‘em both”).
Michael’s vision, of course, wins out, and Hulsman and Mitchell go to lengths to explain why his was the wisest. (The authors miss the tragic aspect of Michael’s triumph, which comes at a terrible cost, as Michael’s personal future shows us.)
It’s worth mentioning that victory through Michael’s approach was not inevitable (imagine Apollonia didn’t like cars), nor was Tom’s doomed to failure — had the Don chosen to share those politicians he carried in his pocket like so many dimes, much pain and death would have been avoided.
Hulsman and Mitchell use Michael’s approach to argue that American leaders should follow his lead; but if one is not convinced of the unique value of Michael’s wisdom, many of the book’s lessons are unconvincing.
This leads to my second point. Hulsman and Mitchell describe Michael’s strategy as consistent with political realism, a form of understanding politics based on the notion that actors are self-interested and motivated primarily by concerns for their own survival.
Before consulting the book to find the answer, two of my academic colleagues and I were unable to identify which of the three sons Hulsman and Mitchell thought most embodied this approach. How is it that Michael is the realist?
What the authors really mean is that Michael’s strength is his flexibility, and they use that quality to argue that the U.S. should adopt a variety of tools in its dealings with the rest of the world.
Events over the last eight years make it difficult to disagree with this rather trite conclusion. My concern is that tactical flexibility is simply not a defining component of political realism.
Hulsman and Mitchell acknowledge that the parallels between their preferred strategy and Michael’s approach are not perfect, but they appear to me to go beyond the forced into the realm of the imagined. The analogy ultimately doesn’t work very well.
Last, sadly, the entertainment to be derived from the book’s premise is quickly exhausted, even for “The Godfather” aficionados. That is a remarkable accomplishment given that the book — excluding its introduction and epilogue — is only about 15 times longer than this review.
As our friend in Miami might say, it’s small potatoes.
Glenn Palmer is professor of political science at Penn State.
In Print
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