Will the war in Iran spiral out of control? Will the United States pull out and leave chaos behind?

Europe is greatly concerned.

For years, former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has warned about Iran. Now, Israel and the United States are confronting the Iranian regime. Yet even as one military target after another is eliminated, the terrorist regime is not only living on, it is engulfing the entire region in war and sending tremors through the global economy.

“It is clear that Iran is obviously not as easy to bring to its knees as the other warring parties had imagined,” Guttenberg warned on March 10 in the German-language podcast Land in Sicht (Land in Sight). He added:

This war is beginning to spread to the region, to the wider Middle East. The supreme ruler of the United Arab Emirates has stated that we are at war. … We are now seeing the full impact on the markets. Oil prices are moving above $100 a barrel. Of course, all of this is now having an impact that extends far beyond the region and the stock markets are also starting to fall accordingly. So we are in a situation that can no longer be confined to this region alone and where voices are becoming louder, especially in the U.S.A., saying that you may have miscalculated the question of what will actually happen after this first major military wave. …

There is a huge potential for escalation in all of this and that has to be recognized. And I believe that the objectives were not always very clear at the beginning. That’s the mildest formulation I can think of. So I think we can make the accusation, as is so often the case with acts of war in recent decades or even in the last century, that beyond the actual attack, we have the feeling that the scenario planning was rather unclear.

To eliminate the Iranian threat would require breaking the will of the Iranian regime. A handful of drones, sea mines and missiles are enough to jeopardize the Strait of Hormuz.

Is the U.S. willing to fight until the Iranian regime’s will is broken? That cannot be accomplished in weeks or even months of limited military engagement. As Trumpet senior editor Joel Hilliker wrote on March 11, “This threat will persist as long as the Iranian regime remains in power. And regime change no longer seems to be the goal of this war. Just moments after oil spiked to $120 a barrel, Trump called the war ‘very complete, pretty much.’”

But as Guttenberg pointed out, Iran’s remaining weapons are still in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. That means Iran can continue to exert its brutal influence on its own population of around 95 million people. Furthermore, “the appointment of Khamenei’s son as the supreme religious leader is a sign that we cannot assume that these structures are already in ashes,” Guttenberg warned. “Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is characterized by the fact that he has a special closeness to and trust in these Revolutionary Guards, which means that there is still a certain degree of stability.”

He warned that Iran will seek revenge not just in the form of concentrated counterattacks in the Gulf region and the targeting of the Strait of Hormuz but also through global terrorism. “And Europe is not immune to that either,” Guttenberg added.

U.S.–Israel Division

While the U.S. and Israel may be working hand in glove in this conflict at the moment, they are pursuing very different goals. Guttenberg explained:

The real difference, as I see it, is that Israel naturally has an interest in wiping this threat that has persisted for decades—and it was a veritable and understandable threat. We must not forget that, in all this, namely that the Iranian leadership has repeatedly called for Israel to be wiped off the map, that it should be destroyed. And that this threat should be dealt with by simply bombing the country for a few days and then saying, “Well, then everything is fine. … We’ve taken out the big bad guy at the top and a few more underneath and then things will shake themselves out.” … The Israelis don’t trust that. You hear that again and again and they say that it must actually reach much further, because Iran’s influence naturally also extends to the so-called proxies.

Iran has terrorist proxies in Yemen, the Houthis; in Lebanon, Hezbollah; in Iraq, Shiite militias; in the Gaza Strip, Hamas; and other terrorist groups and individual jihadists around the world.

Guttenberg does not agree with those who believe Israel pulled the U.S. into this war and controls the larger military partner, in a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario. That’s why he believes the U.S. could pull out at any moment and leave the region in chaos.

Guttenberg concluded:

I think that in the not-too-distant future, for example, the Americans could say, well, now we have actually achieved our goal and our goal is to keep this nuclear program and the Iranian missile program as low as possible or basically to destroy it completely. But beyond that, it may be possible to agree that you have a regime that is reasonably compliant. That could then develop into considerable tensions between the partners, who at the moment cannot be separated by a single leaf. That is something I fear.

Another factor is that the U.S. is somewhat reliant on the support of others in the region, such as the Gulf states. The U.S. even turned to Ukraine to get interceptor drones, Guttenberg remarked.

What Germany Needs to Do

Germany needs to be prepared for all possibilities. That’s why, according to Guttenberg, it needs to strengthen the independence of its intelligence services, which means ending the restrictions imposed on it after World War ii.

“That is the basis, first of all, for being able to make decisions in order to do something that we repeatedly fail to do, namely to really plan for the medium term in scenarios, to plan for worst-case scenarios,” Guttenberg said. “We … often [don’t] do this because we have the feeling that if we play out a really bad case in the government, we could scare the population,” he added, alluding to the constant media leaks that don’t allow the government to plan for these scenarios behind closed doors.

The worst-case scenarios would pull Germany into the war. In 2013, Guttenberg coauthored an article titled “Germany Must Have Israel’s Back,” where he argued that Germany should militarily support a preemptive Israeli strike on Iran. Since then, Iran’s power in the region has grown; eliminating this threat will demand a much larger military operation than the one currently underway.

Germany is spending hundreds of billions on new military hardware in close cooperation with European partners. It also has many small-scale military operations in the Middle East that are encircling Iran, which could quickly be expanded, as Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry explains in The King of the South (free upon request).

Yet what Germany and all of Europe lack is a capable, strong, militaristic leader who is willing to coordinate a knockout blow against the Iranian regime. Bible prophecy shows that such a strongman will rise in Germany (Isaiah 10:12-13; Daniel 8:23-25; 11:21; Habakkuk 1:11). Guttenberg is a man to watch.

What Germany Is Prophesied to Do

In 2010, when Guttenberg was Germany’s defense minister, Mr. Flurry warned:

Guttenberg calls war and terrorism what they really are—not vague or deceptive “euphemisms.” That makes the German military ecstatic. At the same time, he is swinging the German population into a military mindset. That has to be extremely disturbing to those people who understand Germany’s history. The end result is going to be horrifying!

It also signals a dangerous turn in Germany’s foreign policy! And the whole world is going to be greatly impacted by that new direction. … According to a survey released Dec. 11, 2009, nearly three quarters of the German people fear the spread of Islam. If the EU and Iran have a “conflict,” it could lead to the Holy Roman Empire countries loading U.S. nukes into their planes and flying off to war. Bible prophecy says these two powers are going to clash—and the EU, or Holy Roman Empire, is going to prevail.

If this empire’s air force were to have some nukes left from the conflict, they could be used on the U.S. That is exactly what Herbert W. Armstrong predicted!

The greatest nuclear crisis is not in the Middle East—it’s in Europe and the Holy Roman Empire!

Baron Guttenberg strongly desires aligning nato forces with the EU military—undoubtedly because they can use America’s nuclear bombs.

The U.S. has stationed tactical nuclear weapons in Germany that German pilots can use in an imminent threat with U.S. approval. These are currently much more practical than the larger French nuclear weapons. However, France has recently announced it will expand its nuclear arsenal and share it with Germany. What these two nations are planning will likely not be revealed until we awaken to a nuclear nightmare. This is the frightening reality we live in.

The prophecy Mr. Flurry alluded to in his article reads: “And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at him: and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over” (Daniel 11:40).

Since the 1990s, Mr. Flurry has warned that the king of the south in this prophecy is Iran, and Mr. Armstrong explained years before that the king of the north refers to a German-dominated resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire.

These two power blocs will clash, triggering “a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation” (Daniel 12:1). A parallel prophecy in Matthew 24 shows that this clash will ultimately lead to the return of Jesus Christ. This is the hope that these world events point to.