The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable (2009) was written by two US ‘realists’ John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell who contended that the challenges which confronted the Corleone crime family in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic The Godfather (1972) were analogous to the geopolitical problems facing the United States in the early twenty-first century. Accordingly, when Don Vito Corleone becomes subject to a ‘hit’, the responses of his sons Tom Hagen (Liberal Institutional), Santino ‘Sonny’ Corleone (Neo-Conservative) and Michael Corleone (Realist) provide options on how the United States could position itself in the multi-polar world. This article will situate Hulsman and Mitchell’s arguments within a growing literature concerning international relations theory and popular culture and provides a critique of their realist perspectives and considers whether such popular cultural analogies to US foreign policies have a validity.
Mark Wheeler (Sat,) studied this question.