"a foreign policy you can't refuse"

The clever title of the Harpers excerpt of a fun and provocative article in the National Interest: "Pax Corleone" by John Hulsman and Wess Mitchell.

The authors relate the three foreign policy options to foreign policy in general and Islamic fascism in particular to three characters in The Godfather!

It is one of the most well-known scenes in cinematic history. Don Vito Corleone, head of the most powerful of New York’s organized-crime families...[is shot and] left bleeding to death in the street...By a miracle, he is not dead, only gravely wounded. His two other sons, Santino (Sonny) and Michael, as well as his consigliere, Tom Hagen, an adopted son himself, gather in an atmosphere of shock and panic to try to decide what to do next—and how to respond to the attempted assassination of the don by Virgil “the Turk” Sollozzo. This, of course, is the hinge of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, one of the greatest movies ever produced by American cinema. However, given the present changes in the world’s power structure, the movie also becomes a startlingly useful metaphor for the strategic problems of our times.

The aging Vito Corleone, emblematic of cold-war American power, is struck down suddenly and violently by forces he did not expect and does not understand, much as America was on September 11. Even more intriguingly, each of his three “heirs” embraces a very different vision of how the family should move forward following this wrenching moment. Tom Hagen, Sonny and Michael approximate the three American foreign-policy schools of thought—liberal institutionalism, neoconservatism and realism—vying for control in today’s disarranged world order.

The Consigliere

Tom Hagen's approach is an outgrowth of a legal-diplomatic worldview that shares a number of philosophical similarities with the liberal institutionalism that dominates the foreign-policy outlook of today’s Democratic Party.

The way to handle Sollozzo, he judges, is not through force but through negotiation...But the hope Tom offers the family is a false one. For in order to be successful, the consigliere’s diplomacy must be conducted from a position of unparalleled strength, which the family no longer possesses....

Shoot First and Ask Questions Later

Sonny's simplistic response to the crisis is to advocate “toughness” through military action, a one-note policy prescription for waging righteous war against the rest of the ungrateful mafia world....While such a strategy makes emotional sense following the attempted hit on his father, it runs counter to the long-term interests of the family....

Sonny’s neoconservative approach is built around the strategically reckless notion that risk can be eliminated from life altogether through the relentless—and if necessary, preemptive—use of violence.

Sonny unwittingly severs long-standing family alliances and unites much of the rest of the mafia world against the Corleones....Sonny’s rash instinct to use military power to solve his structural problems merely hastens the family’s decline.

For as the past few years have shown, military intervention for its own sake, without a corresponding political plan, leads only to disaster....

Michael’s Realism

The strategy that ultimately saves the Corleone family from the Sollozzo threat...comes from Michael, the youngest and least experienced of the don’s sons. Unlike Tom and Sonny, Michael has no formulaic fixation on a particular policy instrument....Michael is a realist.

Michael relinquishes the mechanistic, one-trick-pony policy approaches of his brothers in favor of a “toolbox,” in which soft and hard power are used in flexible combinations and as circumstances dictate....This blending of sticks and carrots ensures that Michael is ultimately a more effective diplomat than Tom and a more successful warrior than Sonny...

Second, Michael understands that no matter how strong its military or how savvy its diplomats, the Corleone family will not succeed in the multi-polar environment ahead unless it learns to take better care of its allies....

Relearning the lost Sicilian art of alliance management will be necessary if Washington is to regain the confidence of the growing list of allies whose blood and treasure were frittered away, with little or nothing to show in return, in the sands of Iraq.

Can any of the candidates vying to become the next president of the United States match Michael’s cool, dispassionate courage in the face of epochal change? Will they avoid living in the comforting embrace of the past, from which both Tom and Sonny ultimately could not escape? Or will they emulate Michael’s flexibility—to preserve America’s position in a dangerous world?