Speak Softly . . .
How foreign-policy makers can kick the exceptionalism habit
Matthew Yglesias
The Myth of American Exceptionalism
by Godfrey Hodgson
$26.00 List Price
If there’s any discipline that could benefit from some linguistic punching up courtesy of Hollywood, it’s the study of foreign policy. The field’s vocabulary is weighted down with exhausted shibboleths like “hawks and doves,” Vietnam and World War II analogies, Harry S. Truman nostalgia, and a clutch of tersely modified variations on “power” (hard, soft, smart, etc.). It might seem a bit frivolous to seek analogies to the prudent exercise of US diplomacy in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic Mob film The Godfather, but one has to start somewhere.
For The Godfather Doctrine, Washington policy analysts John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell take their inspiration from divergent ideas inside the Corleone family about how best to react to the shooting of the Don arranged by heroin trafficker Virgil Sollozzo. The idea here
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