The United States “clearly has no strategy” in its war with Iran. That was the assessment of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, speaking to a group of students working on European Union Project Day at a school in Marsberg, Germany. He said the Iranians were “negotiating very skillfully—or rather, very skillfully not negotiating.” He said, “An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards.”

He said that on April 27, and here in mid-May, it’s still hard to argue with.

But President Donald Trump did. He said Merz “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” and then hit Germany with the “consequences”—the removal of 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany and threats of the U.S. “cutting a lot further.”

Has America forgotten why it stationed troops in Germany in the first place? Listen to the discourse today, and you’d think those 36,000 soldiers, five garrisons and Ramstein Air Base were a favor to the German people, a gift we could revoke as punishment when Berlin got uppity.

That is not why they are there.

Those five U.S. Army garrisons were established in 1945. What happened in 1945? After trillions of dollars were wasted and 60 million people died, the U.S. and the Allies finally defeated the Germans.

In 1945, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill issued a joint statement with a single, unambiguous purpose: “It is our inflexible purpose to destroy German militarism and Nazism, and to ensure that Germany will never again be able to disturb the peace of the world. We are determined to disarm and disband all German armed forces, break up for all time the German General Staff that has repeatedly contrived the resurgence of German militarism; remove or destroy all German military equipment; eliminate or control all German industry that could be used for military production.”

That was the purpose. That is why nato was built. That is why American boots have stood on German soil for eight decades. Not to protect Germany, but to protect the world from Germany.

We have forgotten this completely!

Germany tried to conquer the world twice last century. The second attempt left much of Europe in rubble. Herbert W. Armstrong, standing virtually alone, looked at that rubble in 1945 and wrote:

We don’t understand German thoroughness. From the very start of World War ii, they have considered the possibility of losing this second round, as they did the first—and they have carefully, methodically planned, in such eventuality, the third round—World War iii! Hitler has lost. This round of war, in Europe, is over. And the Nazis have now gone underground. They plan to come back and to win on the third try.

People thought he was unhinged. Yet he kept saying it—for 40 years.

In 1950, Mr. Armstrong forecast that “the world will be stunned, dumbfounded to see Germany emerge suddenly in a power never equaled by Hitler—by a union of 10 nations in Europe, probably including some at present puppets of Russia—in a gigantic United States of Europe.”

Those Soviet satellites, he said, would swing into the European camp. Some of us are old enough to remember how unlikely it was for those nations to get out from behind the Iron Curtain.

They are now in the European Union.

Mr. Armstrong didn’t live long enough to see Germany reunify in 1989, but he had predicted it for four decades—and when people saw it happen, it definitely rang a bell.

This was Mr. Armstrong’s main forecast: Germany would rearm and dominate Europe and the world, fulfilling the Bible’s prophecy of a seventh and final resurrection of “the beast,” the Holy Roman Empire.

Look at what is happening right now and tell me he was wrong!

Now think about this: Chancellor Merz has explicitly declared that Germany is now in the process of building the strongest conventional army in Europe.

Germany’s defense budget for much of the past 25 years has been roughly $44 billion, but over the past seven years or so, it has started to climb. Its budget for 2026 is $98 billion, up 32 percent from the previous year. Including special funds, its total military expenditure was actually $127 billion in 2025. Germany spent more on its military this past year than at any time since World War ii.

The constitutional debt brake has been amended to allow virtually unlimited borrowing for defense. A new conscription law is set to enlarge the Bundeswehr from 180,000 to 260,000 soldiers. German manufacturers are converting automobile plants to produce military equipment. Arms giant Rheinmetall, the same firm that armed Hitler’s Wehrmacht and Waffen SS, saw revenues jump 36 percent to $11.5 billion in 2024.

The world is applauding this. People are supporting this. Nations are calling it a great strategic awakening.

And America’s response is to remove the one force that was originally deployed to ensure this would never happen.

I can’t figure out how this is supposed to be punishment. When the U.S. exits Germany, then Germany no longer needs its permission to act. When the U.S. leaves, the obstacle to full militarization is gone. When the U.S. leaves, it hands Berlin the strategic autonomy it has been seeking. Chancellor Merz himself said in February 2025 that it was “five minutes to midnight for Europe” and warned that Europe might need to “achieve independence from the U.S.A.” The troop withdrawal accelerates that outcome.

There was a time when American commentators understood why U.S. troops were in Germany. There was a time, not long ago, when the sight of a rearming German military set off alarm bells in Washington, London, Paris. This is within living memory, yet we are now fast asleep.

Britain and America were fast asleep in the 1930s, too. Hitler went on the march and the counsel was, “Isolate; stay out; it’s not our problem.” Churchill sounded the alarm, and nearly everyone called him a warmonger. We know how that ended.

Notice what Revelation 17 says about the power that is coming. “The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit …” (verse 8). It went underground. Mr. Armstrong saw the sixth head of this beast—Hitler’s Nazi machine—with his own eyes. He watched it go underground in 1945. He spent the rest of his life warning that it would rise again because Revelation 17 said it would.

It is rising now.

Verse 12 describes 10 kings who “receive power as kings one hour with the beast.” They have one mind. They give their strength to the beast. Daniel 8 speaks of a strongman coming to power through flatteries to lead a powerful, unified Europe. The political union exists. The economic union exists. Now the military union is forming. And incredibly, it has America’s blessing.

Germany has reunited. Former Soviet satellites are in the EU. The economy is unified. The politics are unified. The military is now being built at a pace that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, with the express goal of becoming, once again, the strongest in Europe.

Every institution built after World War ii to keep Germany down—the Marshall Plan, nato, the United Nations—has actually helped rebuild it.

The Berlin Wall fell 36 years ago. Think about how much has changed since then. Think about the decisions now being made not out of grand strategy but out of pride, vanity and public back-and-forth between leaders, like a feud over a speech to German schoolchildren. And out of that feud, America begins withdrawing from the most strategically consequential position it holds in Europe.

If Herbert Armstrong were here, he would be sounding the alarm!

Jesus said in Luke 21:34-35: “And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth.” That is a warning about suddenness. One moment the world looks manageable. The next, the snare has closed.

Christ commanded us to watch and pray (verse 36). Watch world events. Stay close to God. Do not be weighed down by the distractions of this life until the day of trouble comes upon you unawares.

The U.S. troops leaving Germany will not punish Chancellor Merz: They will free him. They will free the new German war machine to grow without constraint, without oversight, without any American soldier standing between German ambition and the open road. Bible prophecy said this day was coming. Mr. Armstrong said this day was coming. It is here. Are you watching? Are you praying?