When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Moby-Dick or, The Whale. More sophisticated readers than me can debate whether Moby Dick really is the great American novel. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Herman Melville crafted the great American subtitle. Subtitling turns out to be surprisingly hard, and a lot of us have a tendency to overdo it. Popular foreign policy books, in particular, err on the side of the interchangeably grandiose, and could possibly all be subtitled: Crisis, Power and the Crisis of Power.I mention all this because I just discovered that in 2014, Charles Hill wrote an article called “The ‘Moby Dick’ Guide to Foreign Policy.” When you try to read it though, the website is blank, and the maddening white space where the words should be sends you on a furious, ultimately futile hunt for the original text.Less elusive, thankfully, are two relatively recent books that also look for foreign policy lessons in literature: The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power, by Robert Kaplan, and The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, by Hal Brands and Charles Edel.Having now read selections from, reviews of, and articles based on both these books, I can confidently say they live up to their subtitles. Both call on policymakers to cultivate a tragic sensibility, informed by classical Greek theater and history alike. They argue that the era of post-Cold War, “end of history” optimism led Americans to lose their sense of tragedy and become overly complacent. The key to foreign policy wisdom, by contrast, lies in recognizing that in the world we live in “tragedy is a fact of life.”The authors of both books insist, however, that they are not pessimists preaching fatalism, but instead remain optimistic. Tragedy, they remind us, is intended to serve a cautionary role. Just as we study history to avoid repeating it, we cultivate