Will America Win?
Iran’s supreme leader and many of its officials are dead. Within 72 hours of launching Operation Epic Fury, 1,700 targets were struck. Within 10 days, the figure rose to 5,000. More than 30 Iranian ships were sunk or blown up. Runways and hardened aircraft shelters were destroyed.
About 200 Israel Defense Forces pilots led the way with the initial strikes, followed soon after by the Americans, who employed stealth bombers, jet fighters, drones, Patriot missiles, cruise missiles, jdams and bunker busters, satellite observation, cyberwarfare, spying and more.
President Donald Trump did what American leaders had feared to do for four decades—directly confront Iran. He deserves credit for his boldness.
Nevertheless, Iran has not surrendered. The Iran regime is down, but not out. It has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, driving up global energy prices. America is struggling to find a way to finish the war without launching a ground invasion.
America seems unsure of what the end of the war will look like. President Trump has said, “There will be no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender!”—yet he also had Steve Witkoff negotiate with Iran’s leaders. He demanded “the selection of a great and acceptable leader(s).” Then Iran selected Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader—a man neither great nor acceptable to President Trump.
Compare this to Winston Churchill, who from the moment he became prime minister stated his war aim as victory—“victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be.” Throughout World War ii, that message never wavered. Every British subject, every ally, every enemy, knew exactly where Churchill stood and exactly what would be required to end the war.
Now we are unsure of not only when this war will end but how. Why such uncertainty, given America’s overwhelming power?
More Dangerous Than the Bomb
President Trump explained in his executive orders that he attacked because the Iranians’ “nuclear program, ballistic missile program and support for terrorism” constituted “an unusual and extraordinary threat … to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States.” Just before the attack, Iranian nuclear negotiators reportedly bragged directly to the U.S. team that they possessed enough enriched uranium to construct 11 nuclear bombs. Nuclear warfare indeed constitutes an extraordinary threat.
But America is succumbing to another threat, even more dangerous, that lies at the root of its inability to defeat Iran.
The late Herbert W. Armstrong made a poignant statement in his 1964 book God Speaks Out on the New Morality. He said the “downward plunge” in morals was “rapidly becoming a greater threat to humanity than the hydrogen bomb!”
The Apostle Paul made a similar point. He warned that “in the last days perilous times shall come” (2 Timothy 3:1). We are living in the last days now. And what makes them so dangerous? Is it nuclear weapons? Jesus Christ Himself described a time when man would have the ability to wipe himself out (Matthew 24:21-22). Was Paul about to list fearsome weapons of mass destruction?
No. Instead Paul focused on our sins. Read carefully: “For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God” (2 Timothy 3:2-4).
That is stunning. What makes these days so perilous is our vanity, greed, pride, arrogance! Our ingratitude, unreliability, lack of self-control, self-indulgence, irreverence! How dangerous these sins are! How they jeopardize our lives, even our civilization!
Weapons of mass destruction are a civilizational threat physically. But moral breakdown devastates us spiritually and undermines the very foundation of civilization. It entraps us in sins and invites curses that weaken and destroy us individually and nationally.
Virtuous Pacifism?
Truth be told, the reason America hasn’t won a major victory since World War ii is not because of any weakness in our military. Our moral breakdown is our foremost weakness.
In Iran, President Trump is taking on a deeply evil regime. It’s one that has attacked America repeatedly, has attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, continues to plot worse attacks, and crushes its own people (article, page 2).
Yet most Americans oppose the attacks. A Reuters-Ipsos poll on day one of the war found that 47 percent of respondents disapproved of the war and only 27 percent approved. A YouGov poll found that 45 percent believed Trump had made the wrong decision, compared with just 31 percent who thought he had made the right one.
Why? For many Americans, it is fear for their wallets and the economy. After a few days, only 18 percent of registered voters polled by Morning Consult said they wanted to keep fighting regardless of what happened to gas prices.
Others view a refusal to fight as an act of moral strength not weakness. After all, Jesus refused to take up arms and fight. Surely a Christ-like nation would sit down and talk rather than bomb.
If the nation were bowing before God, repenting of its sins, and asking Him to deal with this evil and rescue America from this threat, then not taking up arms may be righteous. But the Bible does not praise every refusal to take up arms.
To take one example, God barred David from building the temple because he had “shed blood abundantly, and hast made great wars” (1 Chronicles 22:8). It would have been better for David to rely more on God for his victories rather than doing the killing himself. Yet in 2 Samuel 11, David stayed away from the fighting—not because He had drawn close to God but because he had drifted far from Him. He seduced the wife of one of his top generals and then had that general killed.
David’s aggressive, fighting spirit was a characteristic God could use. David could have learned to leave more of the fighting to God—but God clearly wanted a leader who aggressively confronted problems. As David descended into sin, he lost that fighting spirit. He was no longer enthusiastic about protecting the nation, dealing with threats and punishing the guilty.
Similarly, God condemned Israel’s King Ahab, not for fighting a war but for lacking the character to finish it (1 Kings 20:42). Joash, too, is condemned for not being thorough enough in his warfare (2 Kings 13:19).
The same is true of America today.
“[O]ur refusal to use our military might is often not because of righteousness, as we like to believe, but despicable weakness resulting from our sins,” writes Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry in his booklet The King of the South. “We simply lack the faith, character and courage to fight against Iran, the number one terrorist nation today.”
President Trump had enough courage to begin the confrontation—but the nation lacks the will to end it.
“In the end, we will prove too weak to survive!” Mr. Flurry continues. “History thunders for us to awaken.”
But most Americans want to go back to sleep.
Dealing with problems before they explode requires accepting hardship. It requires sacrifice by the people. To achieve godly victories requires living in obedience to what is right so that when you fight, you are fighting for the good.
But sin saps the will. It has us pursuing immediate pleasures rather than planning for and securing our future. It takes the easy road that guarantees later disaster. Like David, we become too entrapped by sin to really fight.
This moral weakness is America’s greatest national security threat.
Yet the religious leaders around President Trump are proclaiming the opposite message. They assure us that America is more righteous than ever!
Broken Will
Just before the war started, President Trump attended the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. Paula White-Cain, the senior adviser to the White House Faith Office, praised the president as “the greatest champion of faith that we have ever had in the executive branch.”
White-Cain invited a group of Christian leaders into the Oval Office to pray over President Trump, to beseech God’s blessing on America’s war against Iran, and to reaffirm that America is “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and the Department of War have repeatedly invoked God, the pressing need to confront evil, and the willingness to use American power.
But is it true that America is one nation under God? Is America living a way of life that God can bless?
God promises that victories will come if His people obey Him. And the American people are “His people” in the very real sense that they descended from the same people He directly spoke these words to. (To prove that the United States, Britain and the Jewish nation called Israel descended from the ancient Israelites, request your free copy of The United States and Britain in Prophecy, by Herbert W. Armstrong. See back cover to order.)
Leviticus 26:3-8, preserved for us today because they apply to us today, promise that if the people “walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them,” then “five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight: and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword.”
When America is unable to finish its wars, is God blessing the nation? No!
America is experiencing the curses described in verses 15-20: “[I]f ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments,” then “I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass: And your strength shall be spent in vain ….”
Now, as then, it is God who determines the outcome of wars. Whether or not American forces succeed in weakening or toppling an evil regime, whether or not American citizens are protected from an unusual, extraordinary, nuclear-armed terrorist threat, depends less on U.S. military technology and strategy than on whether we are correct when we say we are pursuing a righteous cause.
For eight decades, our unprecedented military strength has been spent in vain because Americans are steeped in sin.
Sin naturally saps our fighting spirit. And God lays on additional curses to help us wake up and see the destruction we are bringing on ourselves.
You Are to Blame
The way God and the leaders He used in the Bible speak is quite different from American religious leaders today. The Bible teaches that God’s law is good, that it alone distinguishes good from evil, that we must not only truly believe but also obey God’s law, with His help, and that the greatest enemy is not the approaching army or the neighboring empire but our sins against Him (e.g. Psalm 19:7-11; Romans 7:7, 12; 3:20; John 14:15; 1 John 5:3; Proverbs 14:34).
Even great presidents like Washington, Adams and Lincoln, and many other great Americans of the not-so-distant past who were not even ministers, warned us that we would survive as a nation only if we lived right before God.
After World War ii, Herbert W. Armstrong repeatedly made an extraordinary forecast, based on the prophecies of the Bible. He said America, flush with victory, had won its last war. He warned in 1961, “Unless or until the United States as a whole repents and returns to what has become a hollow slogan on its dollars: ‘In God we trust,’ the United States of America has won its last war!” (Plain Truth, October 1961).
He was right! Every war and conflict America has waged since has resulted in mixed results, at best, and never full victory. (Read more about this in our booklet He Was Right, especially the “America Has Won Its Last War” chapter.)
God will not grant America total victory in Iran no matter how many missiles we fire and no matter how many prayers preachers make over the president, as long as American Christianity leaves American sin undefeated, unopposed, untouched and almost completely unaddressed.
In that article, Mr. Armstrong placed the blame for America’s sins squarely on the shoulders of “you—all of you!”
“You have departed from your living God!” he wrote. “You are worshiping at the shrine of pleasure, luxurious living, material interests! You are in a moral toboggan-slide, and although your lands are full of churches, wherein you conduct pagan worship, your lands are also full of fornication and adultery, full of crime, of vanity, greed and selfishness—full of lying, dishonesty and graft, full of cheating, stealing, and murder—full even of injustice in your courts!
“Your ministers and your organized religions teach that God’s spiritual laws are done away. You profane His Sabbath, you profane His holy tithe of your money, and His holy name! You teach your children materialism and base your public school systems—your colleges and universities—on the concept of evolution, which denies the existence of the Creator, and on the pagan philosophies of the ancient Greeks and Romans. …
“You profess to be God’s people—you mention Him in your prayers, but not in sincerity or in truth! You have a form of godliness in your churches and synagogues—but you deny the power of God and fail utterly to rely on it! Your preachers preach lies, and you love to have it so!”
After years of atheistic radical leftism dominating the nation, many are glad to hear the top leaders of this nation talk about God. But we must face reality.
We haven’t even returned to the morality and comparative righteousness of 1960s America, to whom that powerful warning from God was addressed. Our churches are compromised and weak, and have been for generations! We have, even in our churches, rejected God’s law and the need to obey Him.
This defeat is the result: in our families, our education, our finances, our law and order, our politics, our culture—and, yes, defeat for our military!
A Guilty Nation
To anyone who would argue that America is actually a righteous nation, consider some facts.
About a month after people met for the National Prayer Breakfast in D.C. members of Congress met on Capitol Hill to discuss the Renewed Hope Act of 2026, which addresses a crisis in our homeland: online child sexual exploitation.
An estimated 20 percent of pornographic images on the Internet involve depictions of children. One study of over 400 million web searches found that the most popular term related to sexual searches was “youth.” Pornhub receives over 100 million visits. One of its most frequently used search terms is “teen.”
This is some of the worst evil imaginable, and it is common and mainstream. It is a national crisis, yet how many are confronting this evil? America lacks the will to confront our physical and our spiritual problems.
Consider God’s view of a related sin that has become “normal,” that we consider “tame” by comparison. In Matthew 5:28 Jesus Christ says: “anyone who even looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (New Living Translation) Paul writes, “… Those who indulge in sexual sin, or who worship idols, or commit adultery, or are male prostitutes, or practice homosexuality, or are thieves, or greedy people, or drunkards, or are abusive, or cheat people—none of these will inherit the Kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10; nlt).
God hates these sins! Yet most of the nation is guilty of them!
Millions of Americans “look at a woman with lust” every day, using adult pornography. In fact, nearly half of Americans have watched it in the last week. It is destroying their minds, their society and their nation! And it is worth noting: Much of what they are consuming is not between consenting adults but involves, whether seen or unseen, coercion, intimidation and rape.
What about the other sins that Paul says will keep people out of the Kingdom of God? How common is greed? It’s the foundation of America’s economic sins. The average American owes nearly $7,000 on his credit card. Companies like Klarna, PayPal, Afterpay and many more allow people to “buy now, pay later” on just about anything they want. Nearly two thirds of GenZ have used them to buy things they cannot afford.
Paul condemned drunkenness, which we could update from Paul’s time to include all substance addiction. Nearly 1 in 6 Americans have a “substance use disorder” to use the modern jargon. Nearly 200,000 deaths a year are linked to excessive drinking. A similar number die of opioid and fentanyl abuse each year. Americans—individual Americans—have literally sent billions of dollars to cartels, elevating them into paramilitary forces and dooming thousands of communities south of the Rio Grande to poverty, violence and chaos.
Appalling sins have become so common that we think of them as normal. We definitely don’t think our “flaws” and “foibles” are significant vulnerabilities that are losing wars. The average Trumpet reader isn’t sinning, right?
The only way to answer that is to look not at the radical leftists or the Christians we disagree with or our neighbors—but rather at ourselves and what the Bible says!
The Bible’s great warning is against sin. What is sin? It’s not what you don’t like—it is what God hates because it destroys us, our family, our society and the human race! We don’t naturally know what sin is. God defines what sin is.
What Sin?
Look at the sins God singles out in Leviticus 26: idolatry and Sabbath breaking. The vast majority of Americans don’t even see these as problems. Yet as Mr. Armstrong wrote in The United States and Britain in Prophecy, “These were the main test commandments! They were the test of obedience and of faith in and loyalty to God.”
How few in America keep God’s Sabbath! How many worship idols! How many pursue wealth for the things money can buy, worshiping their homes, their vehicles or their clothes. And how many blend images of Jesus, crucifixes and icons with their worship. How many who call themselves Christian and say they are keeping these commandments are breaking them? How many who say they are Christian believe they don’t even have to try to keep God’s commandments?
America’s religious leaders are leading the way into these sins. They are telling the nation how righteous we all are while teaching us to disobey God! God’s Word, the Bible, commands faith and obedience; it says you cannot have faith without obedience (James 2:14-26). Yet they teach the opposite.
Paul concludes his list of “perilous” factors in this end time by warning about those “[h]aving a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away” (2 Timothy 3:5). That is religion today. They talk about God and the Bible, but they deny its power over their life. They don’t tell America to submit to that power and to make changes. God calls that dangerous!
God’s law reveals cause and effect. It shows us what is good for us, our families, our neighbors, even if we don’t realize it. It reveals what is good, such as keeping the Sabbath, precisely because we don’t realize it. It defines evil—yes, appalling evils that we can recognize in others, but also evils in ourselves!
We are succumbing to evil, even as we think we are righteous. Even those few who understand that true Christians do keep God’s law can fail to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” (James 1:22).
God has to get our attention. He has to wake us up! He is allowing us to experience defeat because we are living the way that causes defeat.
Why can’t America finish off the regime in Iran? The fault belongs with “you—all of you!” thundered Mr. Armstrong. Not only the political leaders. Not only the religious leaders. Not only those who never go to church. Not only those engaged in vile pedophilia. But also with you, the Bible-believing Christian who believes God’s law is “done away,” or who is a “hearer only.”
You must wake up. You must act. You are needed! Your faith—living faith—in God and obedience to God will have an impact on your future, your family, your neighbors and, yes, your nation!