To think however that we can give you a nonviolent foreign policy is just not going to be the case. Because we first of all don't think about what we would do if we were president. We worry about how in the world as faithful followers of Christ we ever ended up being president! But that doesn't mean we're not trying to find ways for both Christians and non-Christians to live lives with as little violence as possible.

Your last book was titled War and the American Difference. What is the American difference, and how does it relate to war, and to our conduct in Syria?

The suggestion in the book is that war serves as the great liturgical event for Americans, where we sacrifice the youth of the present generation to show that the sacrifices of the youth of the past generations were worthy. So war becomes the great ritual moral renewal of the American society.

Just think of all the language about sacrifice that is constantly used about the service people. And I have nothing but the highest regard for those who conscientiously participate. And I think that we don't respond to what we ask them to do, that is, give up their normal unwillingness to kill, and the moral wound that leaves them with, I think we don't give them the opportunity to know how to express that. And that really drives them into a kind of secrecy that's very destructive.

So I want to say the American difference is that we are a country that literally morally lives by war and the sacrifices war asks to assure ourselves to our right to our status.

And how that works in Syria is that there is not much moral hesitation about whether we have subjected ourselves to the kind of questioning that would be appropriate to a people who have too long used war as a moral renewal.

The argument for intervention in Syria is that we need to intervene for humanitarian reasons, or to enforce international norms against the use of WMDs (in this case chemical weapons.) Are those good reasons to use military force in this case specifically? And could they ever be good reasons for using military force?

Well, I think no one knows what humanitarian intervention means. If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism. And you could make a very good case for that.

Gassing noncombatants is obviously a terrible thing, but to make a distinction between conventional and nonconventional weapons strikes me as arbitrary. The kind of shelling that was going on in Aleppo is just as destructive as the use of a gas, so it's not clear to me why you draw the red line here. It's kind of left over from WWI and the use of gas there and the 1925 treaty.

And then -- humanitarian intervention. You have to ask what is the relationship between that and "just war"? How has the US made itself an agent in this conflict? I don't see on "just war" grounds how the US has been attacked. I suppose in realist terms, you'd say that the US is a status quo power. It wants to keep conflicts under control because as a status quo power, any conflict has the possibility of weakening our power. But that's not humanitarian intervention. That's just straight self-interested international behavior. And it seems to me you can say a lot in favor of that more realist view, which I think would lead you probably to not intervene, rather than to intervene.