John Ganz

And if he feels like he's being weakened or he looks bad, he makes these improvisational decisions based on the meaning to appear strong.

The president happens to have a lot of power in foreign policy and war-making powers, unfortunately.

So that's an area he can make an immediate impact and try to make a big splash when the policy part of his administration is very much a flop.

So, you know, I think that that's what he was thinking with the war.

And he thought it would probably be something like Venezuela, a simple matter.

And anybody who is an adult who's read the newspaper can tell you not the same story at all.

But for some reason, every...

Fifteen years or so, the United States forgets how to think.

We think that the world is some simple place that we can manipulate at will and, oh, well, we're going to go in there and then we're going to knock over the regime.

And people who ought to have known better because they lived through Iraq –

We're like, oh, yeah, well, maybe it'll work out this time.

Even some people who were critics of Trump went, well, about this thing, oh, you mean one of the most unrealistic and potentially catastrophic things he could possibly do, which is to pick a fight, start a war with another power with no idea what was going to be at the end of that war?

I think the United States basically showed itself to be not that powerful.

You know, he made a lot of big noises like he could affect a lot.

Now they realize we got to kind of just take what we can get here.

Oh, yeah.

I haven't read it either.

Well, René Girard believes that people essentially mimic each other and want the same things, and that leads them into inevitable conflict.

And that's the heart of this kind of philosophical anthropology and description of the world.

And the upshot for him is the only way out of this is religious faith.