Look who’s playing Godfather now

Thinking long term, Michael also adjusts the institutional playing field to the family’s advantage through a combination of accommodation (granting the other families access to the Corleones’ New York political machinery) and retrenchment (shifting the family business to Las Vegas and giving the other families a stake in the new moneymaker, gambling). A similar effort at preemptive institutional reform is vital if America wants to persuade its competitors to resist the temptation to position themselves as revolutionary powers. Doing so now, before the wet concrete of the new multipolar order has hardened, could ensure that, though no longer hegemonic, America is able to position itself, like the Corleones, as the next best thing: primus inter pares — first among equals.

John C. Hulsman is the Alfred von Oppenheim scholar in residence at the German Council on Foreign Relations. A. Wess Mitchell is the director of research at the Centre for European Policy Analysis in Washington