Look who’s playing Godfather now

It is one of the best-known scenes in cinematic history. Vito Corleone, head of one of the most powerful organised-crime families in New York, crosses the street to buy some oranges from a fruit stand. Seconds later, his peaceful idyll is shattered as multiple gunshots leave him bleeding in the street — victim of a hit by Mafia rival Virgil ‘the Turk’ Sollozzo.

By a miracle, he is only badly wounded. Two of his sons, Santino (Sonny) and Michael, and his adopted son and consigliere, Tom Hagen, gather in an atmosphere of shock to try to decide how to save the family.

This, of course, is the hinge of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie, The Godfather. It is also a startlingly useful metaphor for the strategic problems and global power structure of our time. The don, emblematic of Cold War American power, is struck by forces he did not expect and does not understand, as was America on 9/11. Intriguingly, his heirs embrace very different visions of family strategy that approximate the three schools of thought — liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism and realism — vying for control of US foreign policy today.

As consigliere, Tom’s view of the Sollozzo threat is rooted in a legal-diplomatic worldview similar to the liberal institutionalism of today’s Democratic Party. The way to handle Sollozzo, Tom judges, is not through force but through negotiation. Tom thinks even a rogue power can be brought to terms, if the family accommodates his needs and accepts him as a normalised player in the Corleones’ rules-based community. In this, he echoes the Democrats’ belief that Washington’s only option for coping with the Iranian nuclear crisis is immediate, unconditional talks with our latest ‘Sollozzo,’ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But to succeed, Tom’s diplomacy must be conducted from a position of unparalleled strength, which the family no longer possesses. Power on the streets has already begun to shift to the Tattaglias and Barzinis — the Mafia equivalent of today’s BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China). By contrast, Sonny’s response is to advocate ‘toughness’ through military action, a one-note policy prescription for waging war against the rest of the Mafia world. By starting a gangland free-for-all against all possible enemies at once, Sonny severs long-standing alliances and unites the other families against the Corleones.

This rash instinct to use military power as a tactic to solve structural problems merely hastens the family’s decline. Blinded by a militant moralism bereft of...

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Look who’s playing Godfather now

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