Today is Victory in Europe Day—80 years since Nazi Germany officially surrendered to the Allies. I encourage you to listen to Richard Palmer’s inspiring Trumpet World from yesterday, where he chronicles not only the miracles that led to that victory but the credit the Western world unabashedly gave to God for it.

How times have changed. The world has grown more secular, ignoring God rather than humbly seeking His favor. And as we mark the end of World War II in Europe, another war rages in Europe’s periphery: Ukraine. The relative peace that has prevailed for eight decades is threatened on several fronts. World order is unraveling, and the next world war looms.

The Telegraph ran an excellent article by Allister Heath assessing the world’s fraught state on this anniversary.

On the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the world is edging ever closer to another apocalyptic conflagration, with India-Pakistan the latest terrifying escalation. Pax Americana has been shattered, never to return, and with it the delusions of Western modernity.

The trigger may be pulled by any number of actors, Heath writes—Vladimir Putin, Iran’s nuclear-hungry mullahs, China gobbling Taiwan, some rogue terrorist. From whatever quarter it comes, he says:

What is almost certain is that conflict, perhaps even one future historians will describe as World War iii, is coming, and there appears to be nobody, no mechanism, no alliance, to stop it.

The situation feels hopeless. The Long Peace, as John Lewis Gaddis called it, was an accident of history, a one-off consequence of America’s fleeting supremacy and the Cold War, not, as hubristic Western elites convinced themselves, the byproduct of an inevitable ascent of humanity from superstition to reason.

Multipolar chaos has filled the vacuum left by America’s retreat: There is no longer a global policeman. The legacy post-wwii global institutions, and the liberal, technocratic project they were meant to underpin, have been exposed as utterly useless, only viable under Pax Americana. International bodies have become ineffective, corrupt or captured, with international law (policed by the dreadful icc), agencies (such as unrwa) and treaties (such as the Paris Accords) routinely weaponized against the West by Marxists, Orientalists and clever Third World statesmen.

This is a keen recognition of a reality described in biblical prophecy. Herbert W. Armstrong wrote about it in his milestone book The United States and Britain in Prophecy: The prophesied decline of Britain and then America would be followed by a time of unprecedented disorder and violence. The “multipolar chaos” Heath recognizes is only the start of what is coming.

God warned that America (and Britain) would fall. These modern-day nations of Israel have held power because of God’s blessing, and now, having spurned Him, we see those blessings being replaced by curses. Despite a temporary American resurgence under President Trump, the larger trend remains:

America is no longer rich, strong or capable enough to keep the peace, and it wouldn’t want to even if it could. Its efforts to do so after 9/11 ended in catastrophe, as did its meddling in Libya and elsewhere. Its confidence and attention span are shot. Years of overconsumption, profligacy and underproduction have made it too dependent on inflows of funds that come with geopolitical strings attached. Its overindebtedness and unfunded liabilities are its Achilles’ heel. Trump voters no longer want to serve as cannon fodder in forever foreign wars. His project is very much a defensive retreat, the winding down of the great American empire, combined with a maga version of the Monroe Doctrine, which asserts Washington’s sole influence over the Americas (including Panama, Canada and Greenland).

He also wants to prevent a Chinese takeover of the Pacific. He isn’t really interested in much else, hence why he has been so keen to believe the lies Putin, Iranians and Houthis have been telling him.

Given this American retreat from global leadership, several other nations are surging to fill the void. This is a warning the Trumpet has repeatedly sounded (such as here, here and here).

Woke imbeciles pretend only the West is expansionist or racist, but of course that isn’t true. Today, Russia wants Ukraine, China wants Taiwan, and Iran, funder of Hamas and Hezbollah, wants to control the Middle East, destroy Israel, and ethnically cleanse all minorities. …

The balance of power is further complicated by the rise of asymmetric warfare: Drones in particular can inflict immense damage on supposedly stronger countries, level the playing field, and further destabilize the world. …

There were many smaller conflicts before the Second World War, such as the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Anschluss. We can see similar warning signs today, starting with Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 under Barack Obama, a seminal moment in the world’s descent into disorder. The period since 2021 has been the bloodiest since the Cold War.

Jesus Christ called the period ahead of us “the times of the Gentiles” (Luke 21:24) because it is a transition away from the descendants of Israel. He prophesied that it will bring the worst suffering in human history (Matthew 24:21; see also Jeremiah 30:7; Daniel 12:1).

We need to step back and recognize how rapidly the world is descending into that prophesied holocaust. As Christ said, “Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man” (Luke 21:36).