I first read René Girard about 15 years ago. I was part of a reading group at Oxford: we met on Friday afternoons at The Anchor (a pub worth visiting if you’re in the area). One of the texts we worked through was Girard’s Violence and the Sacred (La violence et le sacré, 1972). It definitely made an impression on me. I managed to slip in some references to Girard in my book Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (2011), and I read a few more works by Girard in subsequent years. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Je vois Satan tomber comme l'éclair, 1999) emerged as a particular favorite. Still, I never considered myself a Girard specialist, and, frankly, I didn’t expect to read much more of him. I had what I thought was a fairly good grasp of his “mimetic theory” and of his treatment of Christianity.
I was wrong, however. As mentioned previously, I have been reading through Girard’s Achever Clausewitz (2007) as of late, and I’m finding it as prescient as it is unnerving. For example, in Chapter 2, Girard (accompanied by his interlocutor, French critic and essayist Benoît Chantre) contrasts the thinking of philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz on war. Unlike many discussions involving Hegel, Girard’s treatment is not overly ponderous. Instead, he centers on an overarching question: can we discern reason in history? According to Girard, Hegel views history as a dialectical unfolding whereby opposites are reconciled, while Clausewitz sees a far more barbaric process—one marked by conflict and, at worst, unmitigated war. On this reading, Clausewitz resembles Kierkegaard, who also sought to rein in Hegelian flights of fancy. As Girard puts it, “Clausewitz raises himself above all Hegelianism. His view of history is more accurate, more concrete. You cannot view it from above or get an eagle-eye view of the events.” Put bluntly, the soldier in Clausewitz knows that sometimes “the duel” between parties simply ends in destruction. Even worse, the destiny of war cannot be stopped by politics, since the former is merely an extension of the latter. Indeed, this is precisely what Enlightenment theorists have missed: they believe that the institutionalization of human reason can tame humanity’s violent impulses. Following Clausewitz, Girard argues otherwise:
Clausewitz told us in his way that reason is no longer at work in history. Everywhere, politics, science and religion have used ideology to mask a duel that is becoming global. They have simply provided themes and justifications for the principle of reciprocity. The trend towards undifferentiation has been strengthened by the West’s technological and military means. In a way, the trend proves that politics have been overtaken by technology.
Of course, there is much to be said here, and one could pick a bone with Girard’s reading of Clausewitz, not to mention his own mimetic theory. Still, in this era of reciprocal dualities (Left/Right, East/West, Vax/Antivax, etc.), Girard’s efforts deserve a hearing. After all, as he sees it, the proliferation of this “principle of reciprocity” leads to the terrifying “end of war, which is another name for the apocalypse.”
I could follow how Clausewitz challenges Hegel, that within the finite and concrete "in medias res" position, as in the soldier amidst a battle, that there is no "eagle's-eye view" that could offer a justification for war as the unfolding of a rational process.
But the next sentence I couldn't follow as clearly, that "the destiny of war cannot be stopped by politics." It could be that I just don't have enough knowledge of Girard here to understand his use of terms which you are picking up. But It would seem that the quotation from Girard at the end implies the reverse of your sentence about destiny. The quotation from Girard implies that politics should be capable of intervention in war, but the actual and undesirable state of affairs which Girard describes instead is that "politics has been overtaken by technology."
If we don't have politics capable of intervention, is all that we have an inevitable sense like Thucydides that "might makes right"? I'd like to think we can have a tragic sense of that war, violence, and contingency cannot be fully fathomed by reason, but rationality and discourse in politics can still address and respond to tragedy - a kind of "fragile" and broken dialectic, rather than a triumphant one. (I'm trying to channel Ricoeur here... )