Information Related to "World News & Trends - January/February 2011"
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It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with all the daily and weekly news relevant to biblical prophecies of the last days.
For example, we learned that the European Union (EU) bailout of the Republic of Ireland has not taken the pressure off the threatened euro (as expected), nor has it stabilized nervous markets. Then we soon discovered that Spain and Portugal may have to be bailed out as well. But before we could fully absorb this fresh development, surprising news surfaced that Belgium may also be a candidate for a future bailout. When will what began with bailing out Greece finally end? Can the euro survive all these past, present and potential bailouts?
Then on the military front, we received news that North Korea had wantonly shelled a South Korean island, even inflicting civilian fatalities. The immediate allied reaction was to announce a joint American–South Korean military exercise. But we soon found out that North Korea had allegedly supplied an already very dangerous Iran with missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads that could possibly reach Western Europe. Are we seeing these so-called new "axis powers" at the sinister start of a unified effort designed to harass and harm the West?
But before we could digest all these developments and others, we learned that hundreds of thousands of American State Department documents had been leaked to the media by the website WikiLeaks—replete with embarrassing but privately intended assessments of other countries, including even prominent individuals. Alleged Chinese views of the potential unification of the Koreas (with Seoul as the capital) came to light. Regrettably, this type of unauthorized diplomatic leak may actually be a factor in tempting China to postpone pressuring North Korea to unify with the South for some time to come.
We have now entered the second decade of the 21st century. What's ahead for 2011 and beyond? For the last few years in the January/February issues, we have reviewed events of the year past and looked ahead to the future—based on the overall guidance of biblical revelation. We continue that theme below.
Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens said this about the WikiLeaks situation: "What all this says is that American power is indeed waning. In a world of rising states, nuclear proliferation and international terrorism, Washington cannot be sure of getting its way. How pleased the rest of us should be about this is another question. Courtesy of WikiLeaks and 250,000 cables we have been given a look at some of the alternatives. What's a little diplomatic chicanery, we might ask, against, say, a nuclear arms race in the Middle East?" ("A History of the Present in 250,000 Cables," Nov. 30, 2010, emphasis added throughout).
Contemplating a world without American restraint in international affairs can be a bleak exercise indeed. But that is precisely where we are headed. In his article about the staggering U.S. national debt, International Herald Tribune columnist Thomas Friedman warned:
"Many people understand that we are slipping as a country...If we fail to come together and invest, spend and cut really wisely, we're heading for a fall—and if America becomes weak, your kids won't just grow up in a different country, they will grow up in a different world. We have to manage America's foreign policy, and plan its rebuilding at home, at a time when our financial resources and our geopolitical power are more limited than ever while our commitments abroad and entitlement promises at home are more extensive than ever" ("Got to Get This Right," Nov. 30, 2010).
Christopher Dickey, writing for Newsweek, stated: "Apathy, not activism, is likely to dominate U.S. foreign policy after November...Americans have been in this sort of apathetic but emotional mood many times before, and the record is grim. After World War I, the United States turned away from the League of Nations and back in on itself, only to watch from an unsafe distance the resurrection of Germany under the Nazis" ("America Turns Inward," Nov. 1, 2010).
There remains, however, much more to understand about the American story, historically and prophetically. Download or request our free booklet The United States and Britain in Bible Prophecy. (Sources: Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, Newsweek.)
Nearly 20 years ago, noted historian and journalist Paul Johnson asked: "What has happened to the British? Have we quite forgotten our global past? I recall, as a schoolboy, gazing with wonder at a map of the world, one quarter of which was coloured red, an empire and commonwealth on a scale never seen before. We had commitments, interests, responsibilities everywhere, and we took them with great seriousness" ("Turning Our Backs on the World," The Spectator [London], April 11, 1992).
Clearly, harsh realities are everywhere present in the British Isles today. Philip Stephens commented: "Britain is turning in on itself. Cool Britannia, self-confident globalism and liberal internationalism—all belong to a bygone era...The time has come to pull up the drawbridge and pay the bills. Introspection and austerity are the leitmotifs of the new age. Things are going to get grim...Taxes are going up and living standards are set to fall...The lesson from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was that even before the cuts military commitments were running far ahead of resources" ("Austerity Spells the End of Britain's Post-Imperial Reach," Financial Times, Oct. 22, 2010).
Journalist Simon Jenkins has caught the unfortunate spirit behind the current defense cutbacks. His long feature article in the Nov. 5, 2010, issue of London's Guardian was headlined "Why It's Time to Scrap Britain's Armed Forces." Exorbitantly expensive armaments have been proffered as one big reason for these drastic defense cuts. Britain has been famous for its highly effective Harrier jet aircraft, but it's soon to be a mere memory, with no new aircraft carriers on the horizon. Even military manpower comes at a high cost today.
How does Britain's longtime ally, the United States, view these negative defense developments? The British magazine The Economist commented: "To Americans, it all looks like a dis-arms race. NATO's longstanding call for allies to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence has been lost in the clamour over wider public-spending cuts" ("Defence Spending in a Time of Austerity," Aug. 26, 2010).
But is Britain possibly in the process of repeating similar disarmament errors committed in the 1930s in the face of the Nazi threat? The Economist article continued: "The global pecking order is determined as much by economic performance in peacetime as by martial abilities in wartime. By this measure, China's economic strength should give the West cause for concern. China is also fast building up its naval power."
To help its own people and the American government to swallow these indigenous cutbacks, Britain has signed a new defense treaty with France—joining up their respective armed forces. After all, the French have rejoined the NATO command after many years on the outside. But Philip Stephens, in another of his Financial Times columns, did add a paragraph of warning to his mostly positive reaction to this mutual entente. "Things, of course, could go wrong. The relationship between France and Britain has for centuries been shot through with intense and often bitter rivalry. The [English] channel has frequently looked wider than the Atlantic" ("A Cordial Entente to Match the Realities of Power," Nov. 2, 2010).
For a biblical answer to Paul Johnson's question about what has happened to the British, we again refer you to our free booklet The United States and Britain in Bible Prophecy. (Sources: The Spectator, The Guardian, Financial Times, The Economist.)
Several serious threats continue unabated, increasing in intensity: Namely, the widespread misrepresentation of Israel by the world's media, the modern secular inquisition, the jihad against Israel's very existence as a nation, the blatant anti-Semitism among Islamic extremists and a softer version indulged in by too many apparently friendly countries that ought to know and do better.
Although surrounded and beset by other hostile forces, the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran remains Israel's foremost security worry. In this instance everyone wants sanctions to work, but the track record shows that they rarely inhibit rogue nations bent on harmful mischief from carrying out their evil purposes. That puts Israel in a very precarious position.
Author Jerome Corsi stated in the concluding chapter of his book Why Israel Can't Wait, "Still, in the final analysis, Israel is a 'one bomb' state such that one atomic bomb, even of a relatively low yield, detonated successfully over Tel Aviv, Israel's business, banking, and telecommunications center, would destroy the modern Jewish state as the world knows it" (2009, p. 102).
Caroline Glick's Internet report shows that the Obama administration has been pursuing secret negotiations toward moving the peace process forward between Israel and the Palestinians. One key element calls for virtually handing over the Jordan Valley to the Palestinians. Here is Glick's frank evaluation: "By calling for Israel to cede the Jordan Valley to the Palestinians, US President Barack Obama is ignoring the most fundamental reality of the Middle East: Israel is besieged by its neighbors who seeks its destruction. Without the Jordan Valley Israel would become the modern day equivalent of Czechoslovakia stripped of the Sudetenland in 1938. It would be utterly indefensible" ("We Are Not for Sale," posted Nov. 5, 2010, originally published in The Jerusalem Post).
The so-called "land for peace" solution has rarely worked out for Israel in the past. Why would it now?
To Daniel Mariaschin, influential lobbyist for the Jewish service organization B'nai B'rith International, Iran remains Israel's most pressing concern: "Iran is issue number one, issue number two and issue number three in importance . . . We have been saying for years that Iran is not just Israel's problem, and fortunately the democracies seem to be waking up to this now. We hope it's not too late . . . We are watching as Iran builds a complex deployment system for their warheads. We are not talking about crude devices but sophisticated weaponry. Their idea is to create intercontinental ballistic missiles" (interview with Simon Round, "The Man Warning the West on Iran," The Jewish Chronicle, Nov. 26, 2010).
Saudi Arabia has also become increasingly concerned about the possible fulfillment of Iran's nuclear ambitions. In 2006 the crown prince of Saudi Arabia stated, "They have to be dealt with before they do something tragic." Then in 2008, the Saudis conferred with U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, during which a leading Saudi official "recalled the king's 'frequent exhortations to the U.S. to attack Iran'" (David Sanger, James Glanz and Jo Becker, "Widespread Distress Over Iran," International Herald Tribune, Nov. 29, 2010).
Said a London Times article regarding the WikiLeaks releases: "They also provide the first published evidence of an alleged shipment to Iran of missiles capable of reaching western European capitals, including Moscow. They depict the leaders of Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as united in their pleas for the US to take the lead in crafting a military solution to the Iranian problem, but refusing to condemn Tehran publicly for fear of enraging their own Shia minorities" (Giles Whittell, "Israel's Warning to Obama: If You Don't Sort Out Tehran We Will," Nov. 30, 2010).
Finally Philip Stephens commented: "Yet if Tehran does succeed in its ambition, it will probably start a nuclear race in one of the world's most volatile regions. The pressures on Arab states to follow suit—Saudi Arabia and Egypt spring first to mind—would be intense. Turkey would have to consider whether to cross the nuclear threshold. Proliferation in the Middle East would signal in turn the end of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. John F. Kennedy's nightmare of a world held in terror by the threat of nuclear conflagration would come a big step closer" ("Caught Between Bombing Iran and an Iranian Bomb," Financial Times, Oct. 8, 2010).
To understand the historical and prophetic significance of the current dilemmas in regard to Iran, download or request our free booklet The Middle East in Bible Prophecy. (Sources: The Times [London], Financial Times, International Herald Tribune.)
China reminds one observer of 19th-century America, a go-getting nation of yesteryear. Eventual economic warfare with the dragon nation becomes an increasing possibility with the passage of time. In a Newsweek article by Isaac Stone Fish titled "Chinese Economic Warfare," the dropheadwarned, "Don't expect a ceasefire, ever." A callout on the page summarized that Premier Wen Jiabao "denied using rare earth metals as a bargaining chip, but Xinhua [the state news service] contradicted, saying those precious metals are strong bargaining chips" ("Chinese Economic Warfare," Nov. 15, 2010).
The People's Republic of China has a reputation for buying up the world, with some takeovers currently described as "being eaten by the dragon." Another Newsweek article stated that "China soared through the financial crisis with ease, registering just under 9 percent growth a year, even in the darkest days" (Rana Foroohar, "China Is a Rich Country," Nov. 8, 2010).
On the military front, Newsweek reports that "China's fiercest anti-ship missile, the Russian designed Sizzler, can reach farther and fly faster than the West's top anti-ship missiles. 'Everyone in the Western world is wondering how you defeat it,' says John Patch, a professor at the U.S. Army War College" (Benjamin Sutherland, "China's Carrier Killers," Oct. 18, 2010). Nations like Australia and Japan are worried about Chinese intentions in the Pacific. The same report also mentioned that "China's new missiles come at a time when the U.S. Navy is more threatened by weapons systems that it has been since the end of the Cold War."
Another Newsweek piece by Isaac Stone Fish stated that "China's recent belligerence toward Japan has worried its neighbors, including Taiwan" ("Strait Tensions Still Hot," Oct. 25, 2010). Despite other serious disagreements and tensions between America and China, Taiwan still "remains the main point of contention between the two superpowers" (ibid.)
Keep your eye on the Far East! (Source: Newsweek.)
Our world today seems more unpredictable and unstable than perhaps at any time since 1942 during World War II, when it appeared that the tide could turn sharply in favor of the then "Axis Powers." Many observers simply don't know what to expect next. Any one of a number of current crises could very well explode into something quite large.
What true Christians do have is the Bible and biblical prophecy. What the Scriptures give us is an overall outline of events to come and the signs that would accompany the close of our present age. Our free booklet You Can Understand Bible Prophecyexplains that a time of worldwide conflict is definitely coming. But this publication also depicts a wonderful world beyond. Download or request your free copy.
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Keywords: U.S. power waning British power China, Iran Israel
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