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“John Quincy Adams warned Americans not to search abroad for monsters to destroy, yet such figures have frequently habituated the discourses of U.S. foreign policy,” offers a succinct summation of newly published U.S. Foreign Policy and the Other. Following, editors Michael Patrick Cullinane and David Ryan use Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick as a cautionary tale, explaining that the U.S. should revise its policy of “othering” to avoid a fate similar to that of Captain Ahab and crew.
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Herman Melville’s Moby Dick persists in literary history as one of the greatest American novels. The book takes readers on a terminal voyage in the Pequod as it sails over oceans in search of a monstrous white whale that robbed its captain, Captain Ahab, of his leg on an earlier expedition. As literature goes, this classic depicts the struggle for identity, identification, and the distinctiveness between the self and the “other.”