Comments on: Towards a Pax Corleone

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:38:58 +0000

Dave, I'm with you on the gangster picture front. Partially for the reason you state, but mostly because of a serious lack of character likability. The Godfather is, I think, the only gangster movie I like, other than perhaps Donnie Brasco, precisely because of Michael and of Vito's relationship with Michael. I like The Godfather Part II much less as Michael becomes less likable and his motivations grow farther and farther away from my own experience.

By: Dave Schuler

Dave Schuler — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:20:35 +0000

Yeah, I read the article last week. I hate gangster pictures, at least partially because people are too inclined to draw lessons like the ones in this article from them. Two things that bear mentioning. First, foreign policy realism demonstrably is one of the factors that put us in the fix in which we found ourselves in September 2001. If you look at practically everything that people in the Middle East complain about in American foreign policy, they're the results of foreign policy realism. I don't mean that I think that IR realism is bad; I just don't think it's enough. Second, the article doesn't mention the third, brother, Angelo, who went to live in a small town in rural Iowa and, contrary to the ways things would work in a Hollywood movie, he lived there happily and peacefully to the end of his days. That's the strain of American foreign policy thought that's missing from Hulsman's article, isolationism, and I think it's rather more likely that we'll move towards isolationism than it is that we'll move back towards realism which, unfortunately, wasn't nearly realistic enough.

By: Below The Beltway » Blog Archive » American Foreign Policy, Godfather Style

Mon, 12 May 2008 13:19:50 +0000

[...] a fun article but, like Alex Knapp, I’ve got to wonder if they didn’t take the analogy just a bit too far: I love The Godfather as much as anybody, but let’s not forget how Michael ends up–alone and [...]