The Battle for Hormuz

The fate of mighty nations can be decided by a single waterway.

Seventy years ago, the British Empire shamefully retreated from the Suez Canal after a stunning military victory against a radical Islamic regime in Egypt. They won the battle yet lost the Suez. This geopolitical tipping point in 1956 changed the world and signaled the end of Britain’s imperial power. Britannia no longer ruled the waves and was no longer feared by its enemies.

The United States appears to be making the same mistake in the Strait of Hormuz.

For more than two months, the United States has hammered Iran with its unmatched arsenal of bombs and missiles. While many parts of Iran lie in ruins, the radical regime remains defiant.

When Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced the closure of Hormuz to all ships on March 2, the consequences of the Iran war went global. A battle of willpower is being fought in the strait, and it is accelerating two important trends in Bible prophecy: the decline of the United States and the ascendancy of Iran. These prophecies are connected to the start of a nuclear World War iii!

‘Sea Gates’

The Strait of Hormuz is a 21-mile-wide waterway connecting the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. It includes territorial waters of both Iran and Oman, with some lesser disputed claims by the United Arab Emirates. No part of it is considered international waters. Since it is narrow, with several islands, large ships must pass through limited, specific lanes. These are well within range of Iran’s weapons, and during the current conflict Iran has attacked several ships with missiles, drones and mines, killing several crew members, and commandos have used small, fast boats to commandeer oil tankers.

Hormuz is vital to global energy supplies. In peacetime, 20 percent of the entire world’s oil and liquefied natural gas supply passes through it. Most of the energy resources produced by Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates use this route, supplying global markets, particularly in Europe and Asia.

Europe receives only 8 percent of its oil from the Gulf states, but it relies heavily on the region for refined products like jet fuel and diesel. Asia is also affected. The United States Navy is at least partially blocking shipments that would be beneficial to Iran, including cheap oil supplies to China. This increases costs in China and deprives Iran of an estimated $500 million per day.

The stoppage in this key artery in the international energy circulatory system has spiked fuel prices, which affect transportation costs of all other materials and products, forces factories that normally operate 24/7 to sit idle, costing millions per day, forces build-up at distribution points that may result in the loss of oil wells, and causes many other direct and indirect effects.

Threatening ships in Hormuz is a powerful economic weapon. And America has struggled to summon the firepower—and more so, the willpower—to defeat it.

Bible prophecy reveals how we have arrived at this “sea gate” crisis.

Starting around 1800, Britain and America began gaining possession of every major strait, canal and passage across the globe, giving them unparalleled power and directly fulfilling prophecies from God!

God gave these nations these sea gates because He promised the patriarch Abraham that He would give national blessings to his descendants, and the Americans and British are among Abraham’s descendants. Read the Bible and secular history for yourself in your free copy of The United States and Britain in Prophecy, by Herbert W. Armstrong.

“[S]ince the birthright pertains to nations, the ‘gate’ of our enemies would be such passes as Gibraltar, Suez, Singapore, the Panama Canal, etc,” Mr. Armstrong summarized in The United States and Britain in Prophecy. “Britain and America came into possession of every such major ‘gate’ in this world! So we must be modern Israel. World War ii hinged on these ‘gates.’ They had become not only strategic passes, but the world’s greatest fortifications.”

Suez Crisis

Constructing the Suez Canal was a joint French-Egyptian venture that was completed in 1869. The British purchased Egypt’s 44 percent ownership stake in 1875. In 1882, the British occupied Egypt to secure control of Suez, which connected it to its eastern possessions, trade routes, theaters of war and, later, oil supplies when the Royal Navy changed from coal to oil.

Following World War ii, Egyptian opposition to the continued British presence intensified into civil unrest and terrorist attacks on military bases in the Canal Zone. In 1952, a military coup forced King Farouk to abdicate, and the new anti-British government demanded the removal of British troops by 1956. President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez, removing British and French ownership of the sea gate.

Expecting a military response, Nasser deliberately sank ships at the entrances of the canal, blocking all traffic. This was a serious threat to European strategic and economic security.

Britain and France carried out a bold, successful attack in November 1956, Operation Musketeer, to retake control of the Suez with assistance from Israel, which was being threatened by Nasser’s Egypt, and achieved the capture of the entire Sinai Peninsula. This was a show of willpower of the nations that descended from Abraham to hold on to the blessings God had given them.

Despite the stunning military success, Britain was forced into a humiliating withdrawal due to pressure from U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had not consulted the president before the attack. Eisenhower believed the United Nations should intervene, and he threatened to heavily damage Britain’s financial system if it did not forfeit its victories and the canal. Britain capitulated.

The Suez humiliation was the last straw that broke the back of Britain as a first-rate world power. Massive national debt, apathetic public opinion, cost-of-living issues and crumbling prestige had already hollowed it out, and now the world saw how weak it really was. Since then, British forces and the British people have been reduced almost to irrelevance.

The debacle was miscalculation compounded by lack of determination. From retirement, Winston Churchill said this about the effort to retake Suez: “I would never have dared; and if I had dared, I would certainly never have dared stop.”

“The Middle East is one of the hardest-hearted areas in the world,” he wrote a couple of years later, in 1958. “It has always been fought over, and peace has only reigned when a major power has established firm influence and shown that it would maintain its will. … Force, or perhaps force and bribery, are the only things that will be respected.”

In the late 1960s, Britain still controlled the Persian Gulf and guaranteed security to some Gulf states. But it withdrew in 1971—again largely due to severe economic issues—and Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz. In 1979, Iran’s Islamic Revolution shocked the world, and the strait was now under constant threat by radical zealots.

The Iran war is proving to be the modern Suez Crisis. After strong military victories, the United States may be compelled to end the war, leaving Iran’s regime in place, further radicalized and wielding more aggressive control over this sea gate. Simultaneously, the ineffectiveness of American firepower, the lack of American willpower and the blow to American prestige could accelerate America’s decline!

“Anything short of total victory against Iran and its radical ideology will prove a curse on America, the Middle East and the whole world,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in our last issue. “… America and Israel’s attack will not end up cutting off the head of the snake. It will instead enrage it and make it more aggressive.” (“World War III Will Start With Iran,” theTrumpet.com/34019).

Bible prophecy reveals that the Suez Crisis and now the Hormuz Crisis are significant developments leading toward World War iii.

The Strait of Hormuz in Prophecy

For years, Mr. Flurry has emphasized that Iran is working to threaten the world by gaining a choke hold on trade from Hormuz through the Bab el-Mandeb to Suez.

“Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, and via its Islamic allies in Egypt is fast gaining decisive influence over the Suez Canal,” writes Mr. Flurry in Libya and Ethiopia in Prophecy. “When it eventually gains influence over Ethiopia and Eritrea, Iran will control the Red Sea. When that happens, Iran will have the power to lock down virtually the entire Middle East!”

Daniel 11 reveals that Egypt will actually soon ally itself with Iran, giving it even more control over the Suez. And Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen have already proved willing to attack ships in the Bab el-Mandeb (the strait that allows access to the Red Sea and Suez).

Mr. Flurry writes in Germany’s Secret Strategy to Destroy Iran: “Now rather suddenly, Iran—the world’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism—has basically become the gatekeeper to this [Red Sea] strategic asset. This really does threaten the peace of the world! …

“It is not farfetched to see Iran using its power to control the flow of oil out of the Middle East. … Daniel 11:40 shows that the United States won’t be a factor as these events play out! It is Europe that Iran is going to push against. And it is Europe that will respond.”

“It may be that this push could take place in the very area of Yemen or the Gulf of Aden,” he wrote.

These prophecies reveal the outcome of this battle in Hormuz. Iran will retain control of these sea gates. The U.S. looks powerful today, but soon it will no longer be a factor in the Middle East, and may experience a humiliating withdrawal. The “push” that provokes a German-led European whirlwind attack may well be triggered by control of these sea gates. This attack begins World War iii.

Struggles for sea gates, the fall of empires and a world filled with war will not be the end of the human story. These are signs that the greatest event to ever occur is on the horizon. Man clashing with man leads to a new age of Jesus Christ’s perfect government ruling over all of nations in peace. That is the hope in the battle for Hormuz!