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World News & Trends

An overview of conditions around the world.

Peril or paradise-what will the next decade bring?

While statesmen earnestly seek a new world order, what threatens to be served up in the coming year is more like a new world disorder. Consider just a few of the major challenges we face in the next decade (not to mention wars, terrorism and nuclear disaster): "The end of the fossil fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio-and nanotechnologies-each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation" (Jamais Cascio, "Get Smarter," The Atlantic, July-August 2009).

During the late 1990s the prospect of the 21st century first threatened us with Y2K, the so-called "Millennium Bug." It was thought that the world's computer systems might fail to understand the difference between 20th-century dates and those starting century 21, with potentially catastrophic results. But probably primarily due to sufficient preparation, those fears turned out to be a false alarm.

However, the harsh reality of 9/11, with the tragic loss of almost 3,000 people, soon overtook America. Largely as a direct consequence, the United States remains caught in the vise of two unpopular foreign wars-one in Iraq, in which America is suffering damaging aftereffects, and another with its ally, the United Kingdom, still going strong in Afghanistan. (Both the United States and the U.K. have recently assigned more troops to Afghanistan.)

Then in mid decade Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana, causing massive suffering and the loss of well over 1,800 lives. Economic meltdown followed in 2008-09, with unemployment climbing to over 10 percent of the American workforce.

As Time magazine observed about America, "In large part, we have ourselves to blame" (Andy Serwer, "The '00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell," Dec. 7, 2009). Cause and effect inevitably fell into place. We have reaped the results of our own careless neglect, government and corporate greed, myopic selfishness and cavalier deferral of our own responsibilities to future generations.

But where are we headed from here? Will the United States and the world at large pull out of these present crises during the next decade? Let's consider just a few carefully selected crucial points from around the globe.

10 key signs show U.S. decline

"Many Americans are angry, confused and worried . . . 58% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, suffering an economy that's sick, a politics that's broken, a culture that is growing more violent, coarse and scary, and a government that's out of control. They want things to get back to normal but increasingly feel that there is no normal any more. Nearly every aspect of American life seems to have veered off course into uncharted territory with unforeseeable consequences."

So wrote former Wall Street Journal reporter and Des Moines Register editor Jim Gannon in a Dec. 8, 2009, USAToday editorial titled "There Is No Normal Anymore." He seems to have perfectly captured the mood of much of the country.

It's no wonder the American people seem so troubled. They suffer enormously from the consequences of failing to obey the great God who gave them their bountiful land. We all reap what we sow (Galatians 6:7).

Cultural commentator Jim Nelson Black, in his 1994 book When Nations Die, identified and documented 10 crucial factors-the inevitable fallout from rejecting our Creator's way of life-that afflicted past civilizations and inevitably led to their decline and fall. They are:

1. Increase in lawlessness.
2. Loss of economic discipline.
3. Rising bureaucracy.
4. Decline in education.
5. Weakening of cultural foundations.
6. Loss of respect for traditions.
7. Increase in materialism.
8. Rise in immorality.
9. Decay of religious belief.
10. Devaluing of human life.

All of these factors, bad enough at the time he identified them, are far more evident today in American society and culture. These social and moral cancers seriously threaten the country's very existence.

Shifting loyalties in Latin America

Even the economic mirror of Latin America reflects declining respect for the United States. National resources south of the border are increasingly being shipped to China. The dragon across the ocean has become Brazil's largest export market.

The United States has always been the primary market for Venezuela's raw petroleum. But already a Chinese company has interests in some small oilfields and is planning more such investments. President Hugo Chavez is no friend of his northern neighbor.

In brief, the British magazine The Economist sums up this distressing situation: "Latin America is tilting toward China, Iran and the global 'south'-and away from the United States" (Aug. 15, 2009, emphasis added throughout).

The economic emergence of China and Southeast Asia

A few months ago The Sunday Telegraph of London reported: "China, Japan and South Korea have vowed to push ahead with plans for a new union that would reduce their economic dependency on the West. The three countries, dismayed at falling levels of trade and investment from the US and Europe, met in Beijing to plan for more structured levels of co-operation.

"The move came as HSBC [The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, the world's largest banking group] warned there is likely to be a 'shift in the world's centre of economic gravity from West to East'" (M+alcolm Moore, "New Order Takes Shape in East," Oct. 11, 2009). Based in London since 1992, HSBC issued this statement in the wake of opting to relocate its chief executive officer back to Hong Kong.

Asia's emerging economies are recovering more quickly than those in other parts of the world. Fortune magazine proclaimed on its Oct. 26, 2009, cover, "The Chinese have $2 trillion and are going shopping," and asked, "Is your company and your country on their list?"

Inside, an article reported that "while most of the global community casts a wary eye on Tehran's nuclear ambitions, China has been quietly buying up the nation's [i.e., Iran's] oil resources."

But the Chinese threat is not confined to commerce. As author Joshua Cooper Ramo related, "The Chinese military [in the autumn of 2002] had a doctrine of developing what they called 'assassin's maces'-computer viruses, antisatellite weapons, microsubmarines-which would use high tech to knock out bigger powers (read: the United States) that might one day attack China" (The Age of the Unthinkable, 2009, p. 83).

China views American hegemony, particularly in Asia, as an impediment to its own geopolitical ambitions. After World War II, the Pacific virtually became an American lake, not only militarily but economically as well. "The United States had already defined a 'great crescent' of defence around east Asia. In 1951, it sealed Japan's subordinate independence in a treaty of mutual security" (Geoffrey Hawthorn, The Future of Asia and the Pacific, 1998, p. 9). But are we now slowly drifting back into the hostile commercial conditions that defined the Pacific in the pre-war 1930s?

Israel and Iran: Potential for war

The World in 2010, the 24th edition of The Economist's annual collection of predictions for the upcoming year,pictures Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu as "a prime minister with Iran on his mind." What he reads about Iran in the news today will not ease his anxieties.

The Wall Street Journal reports that "President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled . . . plans to build 10 more nuclear facilities for enriching uranium" (Farnaz Fassihi and Jay Solomon, "Defiant Iran Beefs Up Nuclear Plans," Nov. 30, 2009). A London Times front-page headline put it this way: "Iran stokes tensions with huge nuclear expansion" (Nov. 30, 2009). This was Tehran's rebellious reaction to the recent UN censure.

Author Jerome Corsi recently wrote a book titled Why Israel Can't Wait, referring to its need to respond to Iranian words and actions. The book begins: "'For us, a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat,' Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Yaalon told the author in a private, audio-recorded interview in his Jerusalem office on June 14, 2009. 'We have to be ready to defend ourselves'" (2009, p. 1).

According to Corsi, most of the Israeli officials he interviewed in the Netanyahu government confirmed Mr. Yaalon's views. Summing up their assessment, Corsi writes: "Iran's nuclear weapons program is an existential threat to the survival of Israel, to the extent that Israel is reluctantly prepared to launch a preemptive military strike on Iran, with or without the approval of the United States, as early as the end of 2009 or the beginning of 2010, if the United States and the world community fail to stop Iran" (p. 1). He quotes Moshe Yaalon as stating: "The appeasement road is not going to work with Iran" (p. 3).

The Israeli state is so small that just one or two well-placed nuclear weapons could essentially destroy the entire country. Unless we understand the geography, geopolitics and history of Iran, we may fail to appreciate the depths of its threat to the West, especially to Israel. This nation is not just another Iraq.

American journalist Robert Kaplan writes in Foreign Policy: "Virtually all of the greater Middle East's oil and natural gas lies in this region [the Persian core, stretching from the Caspian Sea in the north to the Persian Gulf on Iran's south]. Just as shipping lanes radiate from the Persian Gulf, pipelines are increasingly radiating from the Caspian region to the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, China and the Indian Ocean.

"The only country that straddles both energy-producing areas is Iran...The Persian Gulf possesses 55 percent of the world's crude-oil reserves and Iran dominates the whole gulf . . . a coastline of 1,317 nautical miles, thanks to the many bays, inlets, coves, and islands that offer plenty of excellent places for hiding tanker-ramming speedboats" ("The Revenge of Geography," May-June, 2009, p. 105).

Kaplan also notes that "Iran runs an unconventional, postmodern empire of substate entities in the greater Middle East: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Sadrist movement in southern Iraq" (ibid.).

A number of well-known statesmen have publicly warned Israel not to attack Iraq, including Israel's own president, Shimon Peres-plus officials in the Obama administration. But Israel may have no choice. (To understand the historic background, request or download our free booklet The Middle East in Bible Prophecy.)

Updating the European Union

A Newsweek article related a common viewpoint in its introduction, stating, "It's become all fashionable in Washington, Moscow and Beijing these days to dismiss Europe as an aging continent in terminal decline" (Nov. 16, 2009). But the writer, Stefan Theil, did not agree with that assessment-his piece being titled "The Modest Superpower."

A London Sunday Times article was similarly titled "Europe Rises as a Modest Superpower." The text noted that "the EU is now wealthier than the United States" (Nov. 15, 2009).

Gareth Harding in The Wall Street Journal adds his voice to the chorus in a piece titled "Europe Reborn." He states categorically: "Contrary to the view of Europe as sclerotic and incapable of reform, no continent on earth has changed more radically-at least in political terms-than Europe since the end of the 1980s. Of the 47 countries that comprise the Council of Europe, 19 did not even exist in 1989...

"The EU, which emerged from the ashes of a world war that left Europe shattered, humiliated and sidelined, is now the world's biggest economic power, exporter, trading bloc, aid donor and foreign investor" (Nov. 3, 2009).

The recently approved Lisbon Treaty enabled the EU to add two new potentially pivotal offices: a long-term president and a foreign policy secretary, with the Belgian Prime Minister Herman van Rompuy and Baroness Catherine Ashton of Britain being appointed to these offices, respectively. It took eight years to push this treaty through.

But where does Europe go from here? Nowhere, according to many skeptics who predict that the EU will ultimately fail. But the EU contains the framework and perhaps even the seeds of a future union foretold in the Bible. (To understand more, request or download our free booklet Are We Living in the Time of the End?)

Germany's role in unifying Europe

On Nov. 9, 2009, some 30 heads of state joined German Chancellor Angela Merkel in celebrating the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the Wall has become a symbol of reunifying a divided Europe, breaking down the "iron curtain," the phrase Winston Churchill coined in a speech while visiting President Harry Truman in his home state of Missouri on March 5, 1946.

On Oct. 3, 2010, the Germans will celebrate the reunification of a previously divided East and West Germany. What has happened since? Writes Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, in the International Herald Tribune: "Over the past 20 years, Germans have accomplished important things. They have helped integrate the countries of Central and Eastern Europe into the European Union and into the trans-Atlantic security of NATO. They have helped build an historic European Union in peace" (Nov. 7, 2009).

Germany has become the fulcrum state of the European Union. Pope Benedict XVI is a native of Germany. The Bible foretells a future European-centered union in which the Roman church plays a major role. (To learn more, request or download our free booklet The Book of Revelation Unveiled.)

Why the British still punch above their weight

David Goodhart, editor of the British magazine Prospect, asked in the title of his lead editorial, "Why are we British such eager interveners all over the world?"

He further asked in the text: "Is it a generous outgoing spirit of wanting to do our bit to make the world a better, less dangerous place-a sort of global welfare-ism? Or is it the last vestiges of an imperial spirit, wanting to plant the flag in as many places as possible, and clinging on to a past at the top table despite our relative decline over the past century? Perhaps it's a bit of both..." (August 2009).