Don Corleone’s character in The Godfather is one of Hollywood’s most memorable villains. He was a fictional mobster transplanted to New York City in 1901 as a child, orphaned by mob violence in his native Sicily that took his family. He went on to create a crime family of great power, wealth, and influence.
The Godfather is a perfect example of art imitating life. Sicily’s governing capacity in the era Don Corleone grew up was weak. Inconsistent law enforcement created a vacuum, allowing powerful, often well-off landowners an opportunity to flourish. As local authorities were unreliable, strongmen were often hired to resolve disputes to the liking of the influential. The rich and strong parlayed this into a patronage system, bringing fear, if not respect, to the people. The mafia, both fictional and factual, imported that same structure to America, the land of opportunity.
Similar dynamics exist today in many nations around the world where strongmen, not representative systems, administer what is considered law. Indeed, over half of the world’s countries today are autocratic, ruling almost 75% of the world’s population. Even those with parliamentary systems are often heavily influenced by their leadership while presenting a democratic face to the world. When the regime believes its authority is threatened, a red line is crossed, and any actual legislative power can be overruled.
Iran is one of many cases in point. It has a multilayered system touted as democratic. Ultimately, however, the complexity of its internal structures serves the leadership and not the people, as recently evidenced by the regime’s killing so many protesters that they haven’t even released a final number of the dead. In Iran, like in a good crime movie, the final word goes to the supreme leader.
And coming full circle, life imitates art in Gaza, where Hamas’s structure often mimics the fictional Corleone crime family. In Gaza, as with the novel, violence, or the threat of violence, rules. Hamas’s governing authority controls virtually all aspects of life among the area’s roughly 2 million inhabitants. It uses a veneer of elections while simultaneously defining itself as an Islamic Resistance Movement — with political structures taking a back seat to its radical version of Islam. And Iran heavily influences Hamas’s worldview, completing a circle.
These examples provide a vivid contrast to how constitutional democratic governments function. To be fair, any democracy is an imperfect work in progress. As Winston Churchill famously said, “…democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” The distinct difference between democracies and autocracies is that democracies foster loyalty through broadly equal application of law and policy. In democracies, of course, laws are ratified by elected officials representing the people. Compare that with the top-down nature of autocracies, which impose laws to maintain power, enforce them unfairly, and often favor those close to power.
It is both easy and tempting for a government to restrict criticism or dissent, but most democracies choose more transparent paths. Two large foundations of the trust, as garnered by democratic governments, are freedom of the press and access to a fair ballot box. Both of those communicate a level of transparency, a tolerance for dissent, and an avenue to influence leadership. Israel measures at the top of countries with free and fair elections and has a free press that attacks its own leadership daily. The reader can guess which countries fall toward the bottom of these measures.
Democracies, by design, are built with systems that allow for give and take, negotiation and compromise. Indeed, the ability to compromise may be seen as a critical tool of democratic societies. They allow for a broader spectrum of thought and belief.
So, what can we expect when autocracies and democracies attempt to resolve their conflicts? While no two conflicts are the same, current examples, notably with Iran, show how negotiation is used to form a new baseline from which to renegotiate in order to reach ideological goals. Iran has quickly inverted the narrative from being a country enduring the most severe military assault in memory to now having what is arguably effective ownership over the Strait of Hormuz.
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Thus, the United States is suddenly on the defensive, juggling challenges including a lack of political support domestically and internationally and a surprising inability to arm itself for a short-term intensive regional war. One can only imagine how Iran’s leadership salivated at hearing that revelation. The U.S. is now utilizing a combination of hyperbole and negotiations of a sort to support a fantasy that, combined, they will create enough stability to get them through the midterm elections. The U.S. is hobbled with a playbook that Iran and its allies don’t have.
When it comes to negotiating strategies, Iran’s responses have revealed what Don Corleone knew quite well: negotiations are fine as long as you control the game and understand the vulnerabilities of your enemy.
Moshe Manheim practiced psychotherapy for more than four decades. His writing explores psychology, history, and international affairs. His essays have appeared in JNS and the Jewish Journal, and his work has been syndicated nationally. He is the author of Elsie’s Boys, a World War II historical novel.