Today the European Union concluded negotiations on another enormous trade deal, this time with India. This follows its January 17 signing of what some consider the biggest trade deal in history with the Latin American trade bloc mercosur. The deal with India is, in some respects, even bigger. Both deals have taken more than 20 years to negotiate.

And both are designed to bypass the United States.

• European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced today: “We concluded the mother of all trade deals today. Our EU-India agreement is making history. The world’s second- and fourth-largest economies coming together for a trade deal between giants.”

The EU is the world’s largest market, and India is the fastest-growing major economy, recently surpassing Japan.

• The deal, when fully ratified by the EU and India, will connect 2 billion people and a quarter of the GDP of the entire globe.
• It will reduce tariffs on over 96 percent of EU goods such as cars, machinery and agricultural goods exported to India, and 99.5 percent of Indian goods exported to the EU, phased in over seven years.

The U.S. placed heavy tariffs on India last year, allegedly for buying Russian oil and thus supporting Russia’s war on Ukraine.

• The EU is actively opposing the U.S. strategy or, as the German government-funded Deutsche Welle put it, the Europeans want to “lure India away from Moscow’s orbit.”

The EU and India also signed a Security and Defense Partnership, as Politico wrote: “The hope is that India, which has traditionally bought weapons from Russia, will double down on recent weapons purchases from Europe ….”

These deals will enrich Europe and India and will likely serve as a new route for European goods and weapons technology to make their way into Russia. But their main effect will ultimately be to starve Americans.

The Bible prophesies the formation of two major new power blocs in our time, a united Europe under German leadership (Revelation 17) and an Asian superpower under Russian leadership (Ezekiel 38). Gerald Flurry explains in Isaiah’s End-Time Vision that Isaiah 23 contains a prophecy of “a brief alliance between the German-led Holy Roman Empire and certain Asian powers (Russia, China, Japan—the kings of the east). Should Europe … find a way to take advantage—even for a moment—of key resources and strategic holdings of China, Russia and Japan, it would have more than enough power to besiege the Anglo-Saxon nations and enslave them.”