Ceasefire or War, the Regime Will Remain

Good morning!

Did you think the ceasefire President Trump announced Tuesday evening would mean lasting peace? The Middle East remains on a knife-edge, with continued attacks, accusations and denials of deal breaches, and threats to resume combat.

[BRIEF]

• The exact terms of the ceasefire are unclear, and different sources give contradictory reports.
• Right after it was announced, Israel launched a severe assault on Hezbollah, saying the deal did not cover Lebanon.
• Iran called this a violation and restricted Hormuz traffic again but framed it as “managed safe passage.” The U.S. insisted that the strait fully reopen and is keeping its forces on alert.

So the war could resume at any moment. But we did get an unmistakable view of President Trump’s bottom line: He badly wants a deal that enables him to end the war. We also see his frustration over an insoluble dilemma: Ongoing ability to terrorize the Strait of Hormuz leaves the radical regime with enough leverage that it will remain in power, status quo ante bellum.

• This is precisely the outcome the Trumpet has foretold based on Gerald Flurry’s explanations of Bible prophecy.
• Our newest print issue went to press with specific outcomes up in the air, but it is even more relevant now, as something approaching an end-game comes into view.

Case in point: President Trump had said his main objective in the war was to prevent an Iranian nuke. But studying the details of potential agreements, the Telegraph writes, “the president’s deal has a hole in it. A giant, nuclear bomb-shaped hole.” Iran still has considerable quantities of 60 percent-enriched uranium, which is a short step from weapons-grade. It writes:

Iran, in other words, is just as close to developing a nuclear weapon as it was when the war began.

Trump’s peace proposal commits Iran to not developing a bomb. But in reality, even if Iran accepts it, this regime has always said officially that it will not develop a bomb.

The fundamental question is, does Iran’s regime really want peace? The answer is crystal clear, staring President Trump in the face.

• Mojtaba Khamanei, analysts insist, is more radical than his father. And he is essentially a puppet of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the ideological radicals who are running even more of the country than they were before the war began.

President Trump falsely insists Iran has already had regime change. He falsely believes he will be able to succeed in negotiations where several of his predecessors and all other world leaders who have tried have failed.

The truth is, as former UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace wrote in the Telegraph:

The Iranian regime is not only still in place but it is also emboldened. Yes, nearly all the top tier have been killed—but the even more hard-line subordinates are now in power. The Iranian population has been pushed together rather than apart.

The truth is, Iran’s regime will never give up its radical ideology. It will never be a peace-loving, West-friendly government—no matter how devastatingly it is bombed, how many leaders are assassinated, or how friendly and indulgent America’s diplomatic team is.

It appears this war will conclude, possibly soon, under pretenses to the contrary. America’s strength will have been spent in vain; Iran will remain positioned to provoke and push. And Bible prophecy will proceed apace.

Will the Iran Ceasefire Remake the Global Order?

Iran wants to charge oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz around $2 million each. Such a fee would make little difference at the gas tank. But it would be a massive windfall to Iran, a revolution in the global order and guarantee another war.

• Right now, Iran is operating an informal system that allows favored governments to pay to have their ships transit the strait. As part of peace negotiations, Iran is insisting that this arrangement be formalized, saying it needs the money to rebuild from the war.
• “This system—informal and illegal for now—represents Iran’s biggest win from the war with the United States,” wrote the Telegraph.

Reuters’s Hugo Dixon estimates that such a toll could net Iran $500 billion over the next five years. That’s more than the entire output of the Iranian economy over the course of a year.

• Iranian government spending in 2024 was $56.4 billion. Add in $100 billion a year in transit fees, and Iran could triple its income overnight.

Seeds of the next war: “Even a fraction of that sum would slingshot the Shia nation to regional dominance,” wrote the Telegraph. “It would allow the irgc to rebuild, many times over, its obliterated military.”

• Ellen R. Wald, from the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, said, “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf countries cannot stand for it” and would “have to build an army and fight.”

Could more countries follow? If allowed, many more countries may set up their own toll booths.

• Britain seems unlikely to charge shipping for using the English Channel or the Straits of Gibraltar. But could China use its artificial islands to start charging ships coming through the South China Sea? That would cover around a third of all oceangoing trade. Could the Houthis insist on a toll for using the Red Sea? That would be another 15 percent.

The bigger picture: The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea states that countries bordering a natural choke point cannot restrict passage in this way. Canals are different: They cost money to build and operate, so tolls are allowed.

This is a foundational principle of the postwar order. The U.S. dollar dominates the global economy, allowing America to borrow money easily. The U.S. dominates the world militarily. Other nations tolerate it because U.S. financial and economic dominance is used to keep the sea open and trade secure for all.

• If America tolerates an Iranian toll booth on one of the most vital oil choke points, it undermines the foundation of America’s dominance.

Britain’s and then America’s dominance of these naval passages, or choke points, was specifically prophesied.

• In Genesis 22:16-18, God told Abraham that He would multiply his descendants “as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore.” These descendants, He said, would “possess the gate of his enemies.”
• Rebekah, Abraham’s daughter-in-law, was told “be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them” (Genesis 24:60). In the context of “thousands of millions” of people, what could the Bible be referring to? What gates affect millions of people? What is the closest thing international relations has to a gate?

This must be referring to sea gates.

• Britain and America used their dominance of these gates to secure world trade and usher the planet into its most prosperous period in history.

But the Bible also prophesies that Britain and America will lose these gates. In Deuteronomy 28:52, God tells the recipients of these blessings that if they refuse to obey Him, they will be besieged “in all thy gates.” The gates they once owned will be slammed shut.

That’s the time we are entering. The ceasefire could make sea gates a big deal once more.

AI Tool Breaks Barrier, Prompts Massive Containment Effort

Anthropic announced Tuesday the limited release of Mythos, an artificial intelligence model that, according to Axios, is “deemed so powerful that its full release into the wild could unleash untold catastrophe.”

• Mythos’s danger comes from its capability “of not just identifying weaknesses in security systems but exploiting them with autonomous, never-before-seen precision.”
• Mythos is designed so it “plans and executes attack sequences on its own, moving across systems without waiting for human direction.”
• Anthropic stated it discovered this peril when Mythos broke out of its “sandbox” testing space and created what Anthropic calls a “moderately sophisticated multistep exploit” to use Internet resources that were supposedly off-limits. In other words, it autonomously disobeyed orders.

Because of Mythos’s potential power, Anthropic is giving advanced access to about 40 “carefully vetted companies and organizations” in Project Glasswing for the purpose of containing it.

• Anthropic is pushing forward with this out of fear that United States rivals like China could achieve such capacity first. Truly, given the speed of AI development, it is only a matter of time.

Thus the world is following the same logic that brought us into the civilization-threatening nuclear age: racing to build potentially uncontrollable weapons of mass destruction before the enemy does. Necessary as this may be, history shows that when man develops such tools and weapons, they can’t be put back in Pandora’s box: They proliferate.

In our March 2024 issue, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote about “the unknown future of artificial intelligence”:

The programmers admit that even they don’t understand it!They talk about a “black box” so dark and complex that their attempts to illuminate the processes have failed. …

Manipulating artificial intelligence is a powerful way to manipulate the minds of the masses. It also opens new possibilities in advanced warfare. Whoever understands this technology has a significant advantage in this world. It seems certain that some will exploit the dark side of AI.

Daniel 8:23 is a prophecy of a modern-day “king of fierce countenance,” or world dictator, to appear and wreak global havoc. The Bible describes the tremendous damage this coming man will do (e.g. Revelation 13 and Revelation 17). Examples such as Mythos show the kind of powerful weapons this man could have at his disposal. These technologies are on the scene right now.

France Proposes Weapons-Spending Spree

France is continuing its efforts to maintain its military’s spot as the most powerful force in Europe. Yesterday, the French government presented its proposal to the legislature to boost defense spending to $74 billion next year and $89 billion by 2030. If approved, it will add $42 billion to the budget over the next four years.

• France’s chief of Defense Staff, Gen. Fabien Mandon, justified the increase today by calling “the possibility of an open war” with Russia in the next few years a “primary concern.” He added, “We can no longer have the same level of confidence in the Americans’ commitment to our security.”

How will France spend its money?

• The government proposes $4.6 billion for space surveillance and communication, which it considers a “fully-fledged area of conflict.”

France also has an “urgent need” for munitions, according to Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu.

• The Ukraine and Iran wars have impressed the importance of large stockpiles of ammunition, artillery rounds, missiles and drones, and the proposal’s largest area of increased spending is an additional $9.8 billion to boost supplies of missiles and drones before 2030 on top of the $18 billion previously set aside.
• Specific targets include a 400 percent increase in loitering munitions such as one-way strike drones, a 230 percent increase in torpedoes, an 85 percent increase in Scalp cruise missiles and a 30 percent increase in Aster and Mica antiaircraft missiles.

To hit those targets, the government calls for French defense companies to invest and even co-invest with the government.

• According to Defense Minister Catherine Vautrin, “Factories are our primary weapon,” and President Emmanuel Macron has repeatedly said that France is converting into a “war economy.”

The Bible prophesies that a German-led European superpower will rise up in this end time to subjugate the modern nations of Israel, which includes the United States. The French military is preparing to contribute to that prophecy’s fulfillment.

IN OTHER NEWS

EU is considering its own nukes, Russia says: “We draw the attention of the U.S. administration and the leadership of all other countries to the need to do everything possible to prevent the European Union from developing its own nuclear weapons,” Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service warned. The statement argues that the EU intends to keep relying on the U.S. nuclear umbrella, expand the role of France’s and Britain’s nuclear umbrella, and keep its intents secret until it has established its own capacities. Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain have advanced civilian and military industrial capacity that could contribute to building the EU’s nuclear arsenal. Russia claims that, in about a month, German specialists can produce enough weapons-grade plutonium for a single nuclear explosive device and, within a week, enough weapons-grade uranium. While Germany’s technical capacity is unquestionable, the speed at which it could transform its civilian capacity for military is uncertain. While Russia’s statements are often closer to fiction than reality, the Bible does reveal that Europe’s core nations will suddenly rise militarily to shock the world.

British military shame continues: While its World War ii ally, the United States, has fought for weeks against an evil terrorist regime, Britain has refused to join the war and sent only one ship to defend its military base in Cyprus that came under drone attack. This destroyer, the hms Dragon, was delayed for weeks, finally arriving on March 23. But “minor technical issues” forced it to dock at a port in the region for maintenance and resupply, the British Defense Ministry said on Tuesday. Stories like these make the once-great Britain look incredibly weak. The Bible prophesied both Britain’s greatness and its sudden fall.

Iryna Zarutska murderer ‘incapable’ of proceeding to trial? Public defenders for Decarlos Brown Jr., the deranged North Carolina man seen on video abruptly stabbing 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska to death on a commuter train in August, have filed a motion claiming he is currently mentally “incapable to proceed” to trial, citing a psychiatric evaluation. A judge will decide whether and when Brown goes to trial, and he remains in custody on both state and federal charges. Every year in America, roughly 10,000 to 12,000 people are ruled mentally unable to stand trial. It is a poignant example of the deep flaws in a justice system prophesied to fall short of providing true justice.

Preventative cure for cancer found: marriage. Yesterday, Cancer Research Communications published the results of a study showing a correlation between married life and lower cancer rates. Analyzing over 4 million cancer diagnoses between 2015 and 2022 in Americans ages 30 and above, the study suggests married individuals are far less likely to develop cancers like esophageal or cervical cancer, both of which are associated with sexually transmitted diseases. Unmarried men in the study were about 70 percent more likely to develop cancer, and unmarried women were about 85 percent more likely. In a world with declining marriage rates, studies like this show how crucial marriage can be even for longevity. But the Bible reveals there is a far greater purpose to marriage than mere physical well-being. Our free booklet Why Marriage—Soon Obsolete?, by Herbert W. Armstrong, explains.