Pax Corleone
by John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell
02.29.2008
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, walks alone across the street from his
office to buy some oranges from the fruit stand. He mumbles
pleasantly to the Chinese owner, then turns his attention to the task
at hand. However, his peaceful idyll is shattered by the sounds of
running feet and multiple gunshotsand he is left bleeding to death
in the street, as his son Fredo cradles his body.
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 nextand 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 thoughtliberal institutionalism,
neoconservatism and realismvying for control in today's disarranged
world order.
The Consigliere
AS VITO'S heirs gather, the future of the Corleone dynasty hangs in
the balance. The first to offer a strategy is Tom, the German-Irish
transplant who serves as consigliere (chief legal advisor) to the
clan. Though an adopted son, Tom is the most familiar with the inner
workings of the New York crime world. As family lawyer and diplomat,
he is responsible for navigating the complex network of street
alliances, backroom treaties and political favors that surround and
sustain the family empire. His view of the Sollozzo threat and how
the family should respond to it are outgrowths 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.
First, like many modern Democrats, Tom believes that the family's
main objective should be to return as quickly as possible to the
world as it existed before the attack. His overriding strategic aim
is the one that Hillary Clinton had in mind when she wrote in a
recent Foreign Affairs article of the need for America to "reclaim
its proper place in the world." The "proper place" Tom wants to
reclaim is a mirror image of the one that American politicians
remember from the 1990s and dream of restoring after 2008that of the
world's "benign hegemon."
This is the system that Tom, in his role as consigliere, was
responsible for maintaining. By sharing access to the policemen,
judges and senators that (as Sollozzo puts it) the don "carries in
his pocket like so many nickels and dimes," the family managed to
create a kind of Sicilian Bretton Woodsa system of political and
economic public goods that benefited not only the Corleones, but the
entire mafia community. This willingness to let the other crime
syndicates drink from the well of Corleone political influence
rendered the don's disproportionate accumulation of power more
palatable to the other families, who were less inclined to form a
countervailing coalition against it. The result was a consensual,
rules-based order that offered many of the same benefitslow
transaction costs of rule, less likelihood of great-power war and the
chance to make money under an institutional umbrellathat America
enjoyed during the cold war.
full: http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=17008
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