Hammering Out a Ceasefire, the World’s Leading Shipbuilding Power, Portugal’s Government Falls
The April Trumpet issue drops this afternoon. Gerald Flurry’s From the Editor piece in this issue is “Does Donald Trump Know the Way to Peace?” (which you can read right now). I couldn’t help but think on the timing of this in light of this news:
America and Ukraine hammered out a 30-day ceasefire with Russia as a step toward ending the war—and envoy Steve Witkoff is in Moscow to present the plan to Vladimir Putin.
The ceasefire proposal was announced after U.S. and Ukrainian delegations met in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. will immediately resume intelligence sharing and security assistance for Ukraine, while President Zelenskyy agreed (if Russia also agrees) to stop fighting entirely, including the front lines. The U.S. sees this as a positive step toward ending the war, with the goal of finding a more lasting peace agreement. (Oh, and President Trump said Zelenskyy is welcome back at the White House.)
How will Russia respond? What can we expect from negotiations with a man whom one Russian journalist called “a supersize model of the KGB”? Read Mr. Flurry’s article to get the biblical perspective on these efforts by the Trump administration to bring peace.
China has passed America as the world’s leading shipbuilding power, the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported yesterday. In the four years from 2019 to 2023, China built 39 warships—more than the entire Royal Navy. China’s shipbuilding industry now accounts for 53 percent of the global total.
Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China’s maritime strategy has been stunningly aggressive. His stated goal is to make China a “maritime great power.” In pursuit of this aim, he has waged a brazen island-building and harassment campaign in the South China Sea to assert ownership of the key region, boosted Chinese control over critical maritime choke points such as the Strait of Malacca and Bab el-Mandeb, and made the Chinese Navy the world’s largest, in terms of number of vessels. With China now leading the way in overall shipbuilding, all these trends will likely accelerate.
Even ships built for China’s commercial use are designed to become naval assets—when the time is right. “[A]ll civilian maritime assets must be able to support military operations,” the Belgian Royal Higher Institute for Defense wrote in 2022. “In other words, every asset in the maritime sector is considered a potential military asset; every ship a warship.”
U.S. leaders are particularly concerned about the implications of China’s burgeoning naval might for Taiwan, the island nation just 100 miles off China’s coast which the Chinese Communist Party claims as its own and says it is willing to use force to seize. Learn more at “China Is Steering the World Toward War.”
Portugal’s government fell after losing a vote of confidence in Parliament yesterday. A new general election is likely to be held in May. Prime Minister Luís Montenegro has been embroiled in controversy for ongoing accusations of conflicts of interest related to his family law firm. Now Portugal faces months of political uncertainty as it deals with rising populism.
Democracy crises like this continue to roil throughout Europe, creating a ripe environment for undemocratic strongmen to rise. Portugal and Spain used to be an integral part of the Holy Roman Empire under the Habsburgs’ rule. Based on this history and Bible prophecy, Herbert W. Armstrong said Portugal will likely be part of a resurrected Holy Roman Empire, united once again through the Catholic Church. We can expect political turmoil to return these nations to their roots.
“It will be a union of church and state,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in the Plain Truth of March 1950. “The religious influence will be used to cement together and unify these 10 nations in Europe. These will include Germany and Italy, probably Spain and Portugal, and France, Greece and probably some of the Balkan nations from among Yugoslavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania or others.”
Germany’s election must be recounted, says Sahra Wagenknecht, whose party missed entry into the German Bundestag by just 13,000 votes. Wagenkecht is complaining of a “rather error-prone” vote count and has gone to the Constitutional Court. If the recount takes place and she manages to find the missing 13,000 votes and enter parliament, the coalition hopefuls of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats would no longer have a majority to govern and would need a third party. Germany has been plagued by weak coalitions for a long time. Bible prophecy reveals that one way or another we are about to see the death of democracy in Germany.
Who is Mark Carney? The Trumpet’s Andrew Miiller wrote a fascinating article yesterday about Canada’s new prime minister. Where did this man come from suddenly to lead Canada? Miiller dug into Carney’s background, including his embrace of Pope Francis’s Catholic social doctrine and “Communist capitalism,” and his desire to align Canada with a Catholic-dominated European superstate. Keep your eye on where this man takes America’s northern neighbor.
The U.S. Education Department is slashing over 1,300 jobs, it announced last night, a move that aligns with President Trump’s promise to dismantle the agency. Add in the voluntary buyouts that have already happened, and the agency’s workforce is about half what it was before Trump took office. Education Secretary Linda McMahon acknowledged this as the initial step in Trump’s plan to shut down the agency. This department, founded in 1979, has presided over a collapse of academic performance among American students and the introduction of some truly perverse instruction (as detailed in our article “What Is Your Child Learning in Public School?”). It is heartening to see it facing some accountability.
