The End of NATO
The End of NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is the most powerful military alliance in human history. Its 32 member states spend $1.6 trillion each year maintaining state-of-the-art military forces and 3.4 million soldiers. That is 55 percent of the planet’s military spending and 15 percent of its active-duty soldiers. In addition, the alliance’s technological superiority, nuclear deterrence, integrated command structures and unmatched military interoperability make nato without rival in the world—a global hegemon.
Historically speaking, nato is vastly more powerful than the Roman Empire at its peak and several times more powerful than the Allied forces that crushed Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Yet despite its unmatched power, it is plagued by the same debilitating weakness that has destroyed many powerful military alliances throughout history: political division among member states.
When nato was founded in 1949, America’s leading generals in Europe warned that rearming Germany was a “calculated risk.” At the same time, Herbert W. Armstrong foretold that a German-led “United States of Europe” was prophesied to double-cross the United States and Great Britain. Yet America chose to ignore these warnings and established a strong military alliance with Germany and the nations of Western Europe.
Fast-forward to today. A feud between the U.S. and the European Union over Greenland is exposing rifts in the trans-Atlantic alliance and has led many to predict the end of nato. A Guardian headline read “How a U.S. Takeover of Greenland Would Undermine NATO From Within.” The Telegraph published “Trump Knows Taking Greenland Would Collapse NATO. He’s Threatening It Anyway”; the Saturday Paper, “Trump, Greenland and the End of nato”; the Wall Street Journal, “In Trump’s Drive for Greenland, NATO Is the First Casualty”; and the New York Times, “The End of NATO Is Coming, and That’s No Disaster.”
This growing enmity between the U.S. and the EU is important to watch. The Bible contains dozens of prophecies warning about the destruction of the U.S. and Britain by a German-led superstate. Mr. Armstrong used these prophecies to forecast Britain’s exit from the EU, and we can use them to forecast America’s exit from nato.
Believe it or not, the most powerful military alliance in history is fracturing!
Greenland Crisis
To understand why so much is at stake in the fight over Greenland, you have to look at the world differently—literally. Instead of viewing the globe from the standard equatorial perspective, look at it from the North Pole. You will see that the shortest distance between Eurasia and North America is across the Arctic Circle.
During the Cold War, military planners in Canada, Denmark and the U.S. knew that any future Soviet nuclear attack on North America would likely come via intercontinental ballistic missiles (icbms) crossing the Arctic Ocean. These three nations worked together to create the rca 474L Ballistic Missile Early-Warning System at Clear Space Force Station in Alaska and at Site J near Pituffik Space Base in Greenland. This system tracked Soviet icbm activity for decades until it was replaced by the Solid State Phased Array Radar System (sspars) in 1987.
President Trump wants to leverage the sspars radar in Greenland as a key early-warning asset for his new Golden Dome missile defense shield. This is the main reason Greenland is vital to U.S. national security. “For purposes of national security and freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” he said on Dec. 22, 2024.
He followed up with repeated offers to buy Greenland, which is technically a semiautonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark. The prime ministers of both Denmark and Greenland said Greenland is not for sale.
The fact that President Trump believes the U.S. needs to “own” Greenland spotlights the distrust between the U.S., Denmark and other nato nations. After the U.S. defended Greenland from the Nazis in World War ii, the 1951 Defense of Greenland Agreement granted the U.S. the right to expand its military presence far beyond World War ii levels. This agreement was “pursuant to the North Atlantic Treaty,” meaning the U.S. has to remain in nato for it to apply. Thus, Trump’s statement that the U.S. needs to own Greenland only makes sense in a world where nato no longer exists.
“Without my involvement, Russia would have all of Ukraine right now,” President Trump posted on January 7. “Remember, also, I single-handedly ended eight wars, and Norway, a nato member, foolishly chose not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize. But that doesn’t matter! What does matter is that I saved millions of lives. Russia and China have zero fear of nato without the United States, and I doubt nato would be there for us if we really needed them. Everyone is lucky that I rebuilt our military in my first term and continue to do so.”
In other words: President Trump is not convinced that the U.S. should remain in nato, and his distrust of nato allies led him to declare that he would acquire Greenland the “easy way” or the “hard way.” Yet rather than causing nato nations to capitulate for fear of a rupture with the world’s main military superpower, this bellicose rhetoric strengthened European resolve to hold on to Greenland.
On January 16, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom deployed troops to Greenland in a symbolic mission to secure the island from U.S. encroachment.
President Trump pushed back, threatening to increase tariffs on those eight European nations for trying to block his efforts to acquire Greenland. EU leaders then threatened $108 billion in retaliatory tariffs.
This response must have worried Trump. He backed down and agreed to negotiate a deal wherein the U.S. receives joint sovereignty over U.S. military bases in Greenland, as well as mineral rights.
The Greenland crisis seems resolved for now, but Europeans are unlikely to forget President Trump’s threat to acquire Greenland the “hard way.” If German elites wanted to build “a mighty, German-led superpower” before, they are now more urgent than ever to stand on their own, independent from, resistant to and even against their erstwhile ally.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark and secretary general of nato, told the Financial Times on January 17, “Since childhood, I have considered the United States as the natural leader of the free world. I’ve even spoken about the U.S. as the world’s policeman. … Now we see the United States use a language that’s pretty close to the gangsters that they should control in Moscow, Beijing, etc.”
European Army
Even before Germany sent troops to Greenland, EU Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius, a former prime minister of Lithuania, suggested the creation of a permanent, 100,000-strong standing European military force to reduce the EU’s reliance on U.S. security guarantees.
“[H]ow will we replace the 100,000-
strong American standing military force, which is the backbone military force in Europe?” he asked on January 10. “Who will form our European standing backbone military force? Germans? A collection of 27 bonsai armies: armies that look nice but are clipped, cut down, shrunk? Or as Jean Claude Juncker, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel already proposed 10 years ago and supported today by experts and Europeans: the creation of a powerful, standing ‘European military force’ of 100,000 troops.”
Kubilius also advocated for the creation of a “European Security Council” comprised of 10 to 12 European nations that can make decisions over European defense quickly. Of course, Kubilius is not the first politician to make such suggestions, but calls for a “European military force” are getting louder.
On January 21, Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares also called for the creation of a combined EU military ahead of an emergency meeting about Trump’s Greenland threat. “A joint effort would be more efficient than 27 separate national armies,” he told Reuters. He said the bloc should focus on combining military assets before building a joint army.
Subtle advances toward an EU military have been made with multinational commands: eurofor; the integration of all three main Dutch combat brigades into German Army divisions; the integration of the Czech 4th Rapid Deployment Brigade with Germany’s 10th Armored Division; the integration of the Romanian 81st Mechanized Brigade with Germany’s Rapid Response Forces Division. Yet much work still remains if a fully integrated EU military is to be created—a force of 1.6 million active-duty troops and a defense budget of $446 billion.
Such an EU military would have about a quarter of the defense budget of today’s nato and about half as many troops. So in a world where an EU military replaces nato, the EU would be the second-most powerful military force, with a defense budget roughly twice the size of Communist China’s military.
For the time being, nato Secretary General Mark Rutte is reminding European leaders that they are “dreaming” if they think Europe can defend itself without the U.S. This is indeed true, yet European leaders are working furiously to change this reality.
French President Emmanuel Macron hosted the prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland in Paris on January 28 to discuss European security. He said Trump’s comments about Greenland needed to prompt an “awakening” in Europe. Such rhetoric shows that nato is not being held together by love or loyalty. Rather, it is being held together by the knowledge that Russia remains powerful and aggressive, and Europe cannot currently defend itself without the U.S. Secretary General Rutte is doing his best to hold the alliance together long enough for Europe to rearm, but as soon as European nations build strong militaries, nato will break apart.
Double Cross
nato’s first secretary general, Lord Hastings Ismay, said the alliance’s purpose was to “[k]eep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Yet prophecy indicates that an ascendant Germany is actually going to invite both the Chinese and the Russians into an economic alliance to besiege the U.S. (article, page 1).
As soon as America began allowing Germany to rearm in 1952, Mr. Armstrong began explaining why the decision was misguided. An article in the April 1952 Good News, of which he was the publisher, summarizes the point: “The heart of the German people … has not been converted to our way of life. If they really would have come to love us since their defeat, would they now be trying to bargain for domination in Europe and threatening to withhold support from the cause of democracy against Russia? Is that the way love is manifested? Can we purchase love with money?”
This question about purchasing love with money is poignant.
Shortly before the Babylonians burned down King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, the Prophet Ezekiel corrected the kingdom of Judah for trusting its foreign allies more than God. Specifically, he compared Judah to “a wife that committeth adultery, which taketh strangers instead of her husband” (Ezekiel 16:32) and noted that while common whores usually receive gifts, Judah gives gifts to all her lovers (verse 33).
The same can be said about America today. Its leaders definitely trust in their nato allies for protection more than they trust God, and they shower these allies with tremendous amounts of money and gifts. The foolish belief is that we can purchase love with money like a prostitute who pays her lovers instead of receiving payment.
This strategy has more or less worked so far, but the day is coming when America will learn that “[t]he heart of the German people … has not been converted to our way of life.” In fact, Ezekiel 23 specifically warns that the end-time nations of Israel (America and Britain primarily) will be double-crossed by their foreign lovers.
“Bible prophecy warns that a German-led European empire is going to rise up,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in 2014. “We have said for over 50 years that it will probably be more powerful than both America and Russia! The age of American global leadership is drawing to a close. While the Germans might not come out and say so, they are reveling in that fact. The U.S. may try and repair relations with its former lover, but irreversible damage has already been done. The breakup … is going to continue to worsen until one of America’s greatest allies since World War ii becomes, once again, its greatest enemy! What Germany doesn’t realize is that it is only a tool in God’s hands to accomplish His purpose of correcting Israel …” (Trumpet, October 2014).
God’s purpose is to teach the end-time nations of Israel to rely completely on Him, instead of bribing foreign lovers to defend them. Therefore, the most powerful military alliance in human history has to fracture in a way that allows people to see that “[c]ursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm …” (Jeremiah 17:5).
Europe is rapidly growing independent of the U.S. and is strengthening its position as a world power. This should stir the deepest alarm within the American people, if only they knew where it was leading!
