Look who’s playing Godfather now

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 strategic insight, Sonny proves an easy target for his foes.

The strategy that ultimately saves the Corleone family from the Sollozzo threat and equips it to cope with the new world comes from Michael, the youngest and least experienced of the don’s sons. Unlike Tom or Sonny, Michael has no formulaic fixation on a particular policy instrument; his overriding goal is to protect the family’s interests by any and all means necessary. In today’s foreign policy terminology, Michael is a realist.

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