Corleone-Style Diplomacy

World events in the context of The Godfather

Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping negotiating over a map the world

I don’t usually use this space for politics — not really since I began worrying about the lure of Obama in 2007, and how his branding may have been more powerful than his commitment to the issues I cared about. I saw Occupy Wall Street, direct action, bottom-up mutual aid as more accessible avenues for Team Human to participate in our collective welfare.

But given the season, as well as the intensity or immensity of what may be coming to pass in the next year, I thought I’d share some perspective on world events, as well as what those of us invested in a future of human flourishing may be able to do about any of it.

There have been a lot of statements and seemingly random chaos coming out of the new administration even before they take office. But as I see it, it all makes sense from their point of view. You can read Project 2025 to understand the means by which they take power, but even that document doesn’t convey the philosophy of life here.

As I’ve been sharing occasionally when I’m interviewed, or in the Q/A portion of a talk, or even with some of my guests on Team Human, my read on Donald Trump’s world view is that he understands himself as a mafia don. I’m not referring any personal involvement he may have had with organized crime over his decades as a real estate magnate in New York; I mean an understanding of the world as a set of neighborhoods or territories controlled by bosses like himself.

Just like on The Sopranos, where one family might control lower Manhattan, another one gets Harlem, and Tony gets New Jersey between the bridge and the tunnel, in the global syndicate as seen in Trump world, Russia controls Europe (or Eurasia except for maybe England — Brexit doesn’t sound so dumb now) and China gets Southeast Asia, the pacific, and most of Africa, while America gets North and South America, Canada, and - yes - Greenland. (See Orwell’s 1984 for the fictional account.)

This is why Trump doesn’t really object to Russia claiming a portion, or even all of Ukraine. That’s Russia’s neighborhood, and Putin’s prerogative. I imagine neither he nor Putin would object too strongly to China taking Taiwan either (which is another reason America’s tech sector welcomes some alternative chip manufacturing plants on US soil). It also explains general acquiescence to smaller gangs like those running Iran and the Israel-Saudi alignment to divvy up the Middle East. (That’s what the Abraham Peace Accords were about — creating a smaller, combined “family” syndicate that would stand against Iran and its allies in that region — but that’s another story.)

The individual political alignments are confusing and a bit beside the point for what I’m aiming for here, which is offer a lens through which understand the bits of strange or even absurd news pronouncements that are coming through the various news and social networks these days, and will likely continue to for a while.

For instance, this week, Trump said the US is paying too much for its access to the Panama Canal, and that unless things got a lot better, the US should just take it back. (It was ceded from US control to Panama in 1999.) The president of Panama replied that the sovereignty of his country is not negotiable. Trump replied on Truth Social by posting “We’ll see about that,” and following it up with an American flag flying over the waterway with the caption, “Welcome to the United States Canal.”

In a speech shortly later Trump shared his long-held ambition to take Greenland, explaining "For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity." And he also declared that Canada should be the 51st US state, and referred to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “governor.”

Whether or not Trump actually purchases, annexes, or invades Panama, Greenland, or Canada is beside the point. He’s making his claim for the benefit of the other big families — Russia and China — on what he sees as American economic and military zone of control. The family’s territory. He wants free passage through Panama, uncontested resource routes to the Arctic Circle, and a nice big island filled with minerals or even farmland once climate change melts the permafrost over Greenland. (And Greenland actually has the right to declare its independence from Denmark any time it wants. I’m sure its 57,000 citizens’ social media feeds are already filled with propaganda for why they should become a US State.)

From the inside — meaning the inside of Trump’s head and those of some of his closest allies — this is not some evil dictatorship but a family-style of governance. Movies like The Godfather, for all their violence, also portrayed Don Corleone as a principled leader who loved his family above all, commanded loyalty from his soldiers and subordinates, refused to traffic in narcotics, and enjoyed the appreciation and respect of his neighborhood. He did favors, enforced a moral code, and earned loyalty. Within the boundaries defined by one’s territory in this schema, life was good, and traditional values were honored.

But in that world of might makes right, the Godfather is only really needed when there’s no functional law or institutions. You don’t need to hire protection unless there are gangs and criminals from whom you need protection. So a violent, scary world “out there” is required. You can’t be a mafia boss without other enemy mafia bosses, or at least enemies within — immigrants, foreigners — to be constantly rooted out. This is why, in the absence of a credible global threat, Trump promises protection from Mexican gangs and transgender athletes, whether or not they pose any real danger.

I do think Trump would have a hard time attaining Corleone-like authority of this kind. Given his failure last week to pressure Congress to approve his (or actually Elon Musk’s) proposed elimination of the debt limit, it looks like he’ll have a lot less absolute power than many feared. But his stated goals are not nonsensical bluster; they suggest a coherent, if unattainable global configuration — one where America exploits and protects its regional authority while abandoning its ideological protectorate around the globe.

Now, what do Musk and the tech bros have to do with all this? Why are they so interested in government all of a sudden? To understand this, we have to remember they mean to occupy and influence a different plane altogether. Peter Thiel’s book From Zero to One explains this philosophy from a business and a distorted Catholic perspective. You, me, Trump, Putin, and all us humans live here on the ground, competing for stuff and physical territory. The smart tech bro transcends all this competes one level up — one order of magnitude above these mundane conflicts.

On the Internet, that was called “aggregation.” A bunch of dotcom businesses are competing with each other on the web, so the smart developers level up and create websites like Amazon and Facebook, that aggregate all the other businesses who create storefronts on the platform. On a more existential level — the one I wrote about in Survival of the Richest — leveling up means being one of the humans who rise above this plane of reality altogether and pioneer a post-human future.

For Musk and his ilk, that could mean making enough modifications to the human organism to allow some post-human entities to migrate to a Mars dome and start over there. Or it could mean developing mind clones that let human consciousness live on chips aboard satellites and crafts that venture through space or maybe even seed other planets. The sky isn’t even the limit.

No, the limit is time. For the post-humanist, or “effective altruist”, the object of the game is to get a space program or other post-human project up and running before the planet’s resources burn out. The physical planet and all of its beings are just the fuel and labor for the post-human mission, like the first stage of a rocket that is discarded once it is spent. And of course, we get left behind, too. In this view, we version 1.0 humans are in the larval stage, like maggots, living on a piece of dung. The ones who sprout wings and develop into flies are the only ones who matter, because they manage get off this dung heap and spawn new civilizations elsewhere. The tech bros and the people who are lucky enough to get their post-human upgrades are those flies. They’re in a race to use their money and tech to evolve and get off this dying planet, even if it means accelerating that destruction. Think eschaton, or the ascension (maybe a bit more Easter than Christmas).

And, at least from their point of view, it’s not selfish or evil but humanity’s salvation. Musk means it when he says he cares more than anyone about the human future. (He actually declared himself a member of Team Human, though he is not a paying Patreon subscriber to the podcast.) It’s just that his definition of “human” may be different than yours or mine. He wants to bring what believes is essentially human, human data, to the next place before this one is used up. Or at the very least, trasn-humans who are upgraded with enough cyborg apparatus to survive in space.

That’s why it’s so important tech bros like him get involved in government, and direct it toward building nuclear power plants that can generate enough energy for their AI systems, seizing territories with the rare earth metals and water necessary to build and run the servers, and deregulating the data harvesting required for all the machine learning. When Musk pushes Trump to crash a budget negotiation and demand an end to the debt ceiling, it’s not just so that it will be easier for him ask for continued tens of billions of dollars of government subsidies of his Tesla sales; it’s so the government can spend everything right now on the territorial expansion and resource extraction necessary to build whatever it is that’s going to get Musk off the planet or into another dimension before the shit hits the fan and this place becomes uninhabitable.

People have the intuitive sense that Musk is operating Trump like a marionette, but I think that has less to do with him leading policy decisions than his ability to manage our affairs from a remove, with priorities that have little do with conditions here on the ground.

I meant for this to be a happy holiday message, so let me follow that annual sense-making tour of the geopolitical landscape under Trump with this: if the people running that show are obsessed with the image on TV (Trump) or the cyborg future (Musk), then they have ceded much of the actual territory for human existence and flourishing back to us.

Yes, global shipping and trade depend on things like who controls the Panama Canal. And AI developers may want whatever energy and rare earth metals are sitting under Greenland’s permafrost. But I’m not sure how closely these would-be feudalists’ dreams of power actually match up with their abilities. Sure, Trump can win the presidency, but I’m not sure he has the skills to marshal the support he needs from others in government to run a global protection racket, while also running a tech bro agenda he doesn’t even understand.

This may actually be a when-the-cat’s-away-the-mice-will play moment for both the counterculture and those working on the bottom-up, locally brewed solutions we need to build resilience over the long run. If they’re focused on positioning themselves for climate disaster, boxing out a billion refugees, and accelerating toward space migration, we the people can focus on land management, local land trusts, agrarian networks, mutual aid, and all those other activities that makes us more resilient and less dependent on our mob bosses.

The part I’m not so sure about is how to stem the massive energy expenditure and unfettered extraction of resources required for AI development and exponential economic growth. Some of Trump’s earlier advisors, like Steve Bannon, were highly critical of domination by the tech industry. Bannon even read long portions of my book Team Human aloud on his podcast. So maybe Trump will tire of Musk, respond to the Democrat’s trolling ridicule about Musk being in charge, or come to the conclusion that he’s being played. I’m not sure there’s room for two trolls in chief.

In the meantime, one of the best things we can do to minimize the power of the mob boss is not to be afraid. Sure, when someone gets killed on the subway — by an immigrant no less — it will be publicized and amplified way beyond its proportional significance. That’s by design, to keep us in a state of fear where don’t trust each other, and feel we need the protection rackets to feel safe. So the easiest first step we can take is to build back that trust. Rather than winning the favor of our feudal lords, we learn to do favors for one another.

Our friendship, our trust, our mutual aid, our attention to our local realities, is kryptonite to these would-be ubermen. It’s the home planet. The earth: where we and they are actually from, and where someday even they will all return.