The European Union announced February 6 that it would give €1 billion (us$1.1 billion) to fight the Islamic State and to aid the crises in Syria and Iraq.

In addition, the EU plans to help start anti-radicalization programs and take steps to curb terror financing. It also plans to work against the flow of foreign fighters into the area.

Three days later, the EU announced that it will also increase support for Lebanon. EU foreign policy chief Federica announced the plan in Brussels:

Soundbite: “The European Union is ready to step up its support for Lebanon to address these challenges. We are already providing substantial support with an overall envelope of €180 million euros ($203 million) last year, and we have announced an additional €37 million ($41 million) of humanitarian aid just last week.”

Sharing a border with Syria means Lebanon faces security challenges from the besieged country. Approximately 3.2 million people have fled the fighting in Syria—many of them going to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

Watch for the EU to continue to increase its presence in the Middle East as the Islamic State causes greater instability in the area. The lack of action from the United States is also driving Europe forward. To learn why Europe will soon replace America as the leading power in the Middle East, watch Gerald Flurry’s recent program “The Yemen Crisis.”

President Barack Obama won’t meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his trip to the United States in March. Netanyahu was invited by Speaker of the House John Boehner to address Congress on March 3. President Obama and high-ranking White House officials are upset by the invitation.

President Obama says Netanyahu should not be coming to the U.S. so close to Israel’s national elections, which will be held two weeks after Netanyahu speaks to Congress. “I’m declining to meet with him simply because our general policy is, we don’t meet with any world leader two weeks before their election,” Obama said in an interview with cnn.

Netanyahu’s decision to address Congress, even after the president’s displeasure, sends a strong signal about Obama-Netanyahu relations. You don’t defy the president of the United States unless the situation is desperate or relations are beyond healing. It has been reported that President Obama’s officials are currently in Israel trying to undermine Netanyahu’s attempt at reelection.

Israel and the Obama administration have long been at odds over how to deal with Iran. Netanyahu will reportedly address the joint session of Congress to discuss Iran and its nuclear program. Israel wants to see Iran’s nuclear program abolished. It is pushing for more sanctions while President Obama keeps postponing sanctions as a negotiating tool. It appears Iran is a wedge in the U.S.-Israel alliance.

Netanyahu does not support President Obama’s deal with Iran, which is to be announced in late March. Sixty-one percent of Israelis believe President Obama will sign the deal regardless of Israel’s requests not to. The deal is set to reduce and eventually end sanctions on Iran in return for Iran agreeing to freeze its nuclear program.

But how do you guarantee it won’t be restarted once the world has moved on? Netanyahu knows what Iran could do. His country is well within range of an Iranian missile. Iran’s ayatollahs and leaders have made no secret that they want to wipe Israel off the map.

American leaders seem more concerned about upsetting Israel’s mortal enemy than supporting their strongest ally in the region. The U.S. seems to have forgotten that Iran has also sworn to destroy America. While America cozies up to its enemy, it’s humiliating and backstabbing its ally.

America is supposedly Israel’s strongest ally. Watch as this once strong alliance continues to deteriorate. America’s alienation of Israel will cause Israel to look to Germany for help. Read “The Growing U.S.-Israel Divide” and Jerusalem in Prophecy to fully understand where President Obama’s most recent snubbing of Israel will lead.

Before Europe goes criticizing Russia for working to build a “sphere of influence” around itself, the Europeans should take a look at their own stated goals and policies. That is the assessment of a January 28 brief by Courcy’s Intelligence called “Russia, and the Beam in Europe’s Eye.”

“One of the constantly repeated refrains of European Union foreign policy,” the intelligence brief says, “is that the time of ‘spheres of influence’ is past and that the attempt by Russia to enforce one around its periphery is illegitimate.” But Courcy’s points out the hypocrisy of Europe’s criticism, saying that in recent times, “key EU policymaking bodies have themselves talked about the need to develop and defend an extensive EU sphere of influence.”

One of the most recent instances of Europe decrying Russia’s behavior came on January 20, when the European Council of Foreign Relations said: “Russia wants to think of itself as a great power, and its definition of a great power includes having a ‘sphere of influence’ around its border …. Understandably, the EU cannot enter a dialogue on these terms. Thus, the disagreement between the West and Moscow is a fundamental one.”

This criticism, Courcy’s says, is hypocritical on Europe’s part:

The European Union’s self-perception (and the external image it seeks to project) is that it is an entirely benign new form of power that eschews the old ways of great-power politics. But is Russia entirely mistaken in doubting this? The European Institute for Security Studies (euiss) describes itself as “the union’s agency dealing with the analysis of foreign, security and defense issues.” In early 2013, it produced a major report entitled: Enabling the Future—European Military Capabilities 2013-2025, in which it argued openly for two things: first, for the recognition of extensive “zones of EU privileged influence” and, second, for developing and maintaining “capable and well-functioning armed forces” to improve the EU member states’ “ability to temporarily project and even permanently extend their armed forces” into these regions.

The euiss defines these “zones of EU privileged influence” in exceptionally broad terms, as including “the eastern and southern neighborhoods; the ‘neighbors of the neighbors’ (from Mali to Somalia, from the Gulf to Central Asia), and the critical sea lanes in the ‘Indo-Pacific’ (from Suez to Shanghai) and the ‘wider north’ (around and across the Arctic).”

Within this sphere of influence, the objectives of European military power would be to protect supplies of energy and resources in overseas areas and “remote lands” from “exploitation or annexation by foreign players.” The euiss says EU forces should also maintain regional balances of power, “which favor European values and requirements.”

The Courcy’s brief concludes:

This is an ambitious document which foresees the development, within a relatively short period of time, of the European Union into a major power with an extensive sphere of influence and commensurate military capabilities, and with the willingness to defend the one with the other.This may indeed be a rational development for the European Union, but it is not clear why European leaders should expect the Kremlin to accept that the development of spheres of influence, and planning for their defense by military force, is acceptable for the European Union but not for Russia.

The title of the Courcy piece alludes to a statement from Jesus Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount,” as recorded in Matthew 7: “And why beholdest thou the mote [speck] that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (verses 3-5).

In light of the euiss’s major report, alongside Europe’s self-serving actions in the breakup of Yugoslavia and other recent European moves, it indeed seems that the “eye” of Europe is encumbered by an expansionistic and imperialistic beam. To understand how and why Europe’s hypocrisy can work to Russia’s advantage, read Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s article “Putin Remembers Yugoslavia.”