WorldWatch
Europe
Europe and Germany are taking a stronger military leadership role. NATO held its largest air drills in history on June 12, involving more than 10,000 personnel, 250 aircraft, 25 countries and air bases across the Czech Republic, Germany and the Netherlands, all under German command. United States Air National Guard Director General Michael Loh said, “This is about now establishing what it means to go against a great power in a great power competition.” The drills began as an exercise between the U.S. and Germany but expanded to include Japan, Sweden and other NATO powers.
Europe may have to put its military training to use soon. NATO reinforced its soldiers in Kosovo after violent protests broke out on May 29. Kosovo had held mayoral elections, but Serbs, who do not recognize the Kosovar government, boycotted the vote, with a Serbian turnout of less than 4 percent. Albanian candidates won easily, and the Kosovar government appointed the mayors, including those in Serbian areas. The region is of great strategic importance to Europe and Germany, which used NATO to break up Yugoslavia and dominate the Balkans. Watch for Germany to maintain and increase that dominance.
Europe will also soon use its growing military force to deal with its migrant crisis. On June 8, a Syrian man with refugee status in Sweden stabbed people in a park in southeastern France, including four young children, between 1 and 3 years old. On June 10, a 15-year-old boy was killed and three people were injured in a shooting in Stockholm, Sweden, shortly before another unrelated shooting in the area that injured three people. A 2017 study found that 95 percent of people involved in criminal gangs are migrants or have at least one migrant parent. Gang violence in Sweden has exploded since 2015, when the government opened the nation up to the second-highest number of migrants per capita in Europe.
This situation draws Europe into more dealings with North Africa. On June 11, the European Union offered over $1 billion to the authoritarian government in Tunisia to stop migrants from crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte traveled to Tunisia to discuss the financial assistance package.
Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in his article “The Holy Roman Empire Goes Public—Big Time!”: “A trend is unfolding in Europe that you should keep a close watch on. Europeans have been besieged by immigrants from the Middle East, growing Muslim populations within their midst, cityscapes filling with mosques and minarets, portions of their cities turning into Muslim enclaves that local police dare not enter, even Islamic terrorist attacks. And more and more Europeans are looking for solutions in their own history. Specifically, their religious history.” Learn how this will end by reading Mr. Flurry’s booklet The King of the South.
Asia
China’s preparations to invade Taiwan are entering a new phase. The Chinese Communist Party conquered mainland China in 1949 and has never controlled Taiwan, but it claims sovereignty over the island nation and has threatened for years to militarily attack the democratic nation if that is what is required to bring it under its control. Its defense ministry released a statement on May 16 saying the People’s Liberation Army is ready to “resolutely smash” Taiwan and its desire for self-rule.
A May 22 study of 1,824 Chinese nationals by the National University of Singapore found that 55 percent of respondents said they support launching a war to unify Taiwan with China, and 57 percent supported use of economic sanctions against the island. Only 33 percent said they opposed forceful unification.
For decades, America’s weapons sales to Taiwan, political backing and security guarantees have dissuaded China from launching an invasion. However, America may no longer be able to defend even itself.
On May 25, United States Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro admitted that American naval power “has been impacted” by Chinese state-backed cyberattacks. The attacks, conducted by a Chinese cyberespionage group called Volt Typhoon, embedded malicious code in military computer systems including those on Guam, the home of a key American port and the massive Andersen Air Force Base, which would be a centerpiece in any American military response to a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Analysts believe the code that China planted could be activated at its will to impair or disable American systems needed to come to Taiwan’s defense. The Taiwanese would be left to face the Chinese Communist forces alone, a fight they would quickly lose if they chose to engage at all.
In the June 1999 Trumpet issue, Gerald Flurry identified the U.S. military’s reliance on technology as its Achilles’ heel, a vulnerability that could lead to the fulfillment of a landmark prophecy in Ezekiel 7:14: “They have blown the trumpet, even to make all ready; but none goeth to the battle: for my wrath is upon all the multitude thereof.”
“It seems everybody is expecting our people to go into battle, but the greatest tragedy imaginable occurs!” Mr. Flurry writes. “Nobody goes to battle—even though the trumpet is blown! Will it be because of a computer terrorist?”
Middle East
Rumors are circulating that Iran and the United States are close to an unofficial nuclear deal. In comments to local media translated by Iran International on June 12, Iranian politician Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh said the “unwritten deal” would mean “the American side will no longer enforce the ‘maximum pressure’ policy [of President Donald Trump], close its eyes to some of Iran’s energy deals, and [allow] the release of Iran’s frozen funds in return for Iran refraining from expanding its nuclear program more than the current level.”
This appears to be another win for Iran’s radical Islamist regime and its development of nuclear weapons. Uranium enriched to 60 percent has no known civilian application, and Iran passed that threshold years ago. It is the only nation without nuclear weapons with highly enriched uranium that has now reached 84 percent. At 90 percent, it will become weapons-grade.
“Iran is extremely radical—the king over radical Islam,” Gerald Flurry writes in The King of the South. “Where is this nation’s pushiness leading? To war! Just as it has in the past. It is leading inevitably to terrifying war with weapons of mass destruction. It can lead nowhere else. Iran is preparing itself to trigger a nuclear World War iii!”
China and Saudi Arabia signed trade deals worth $10 billion on June 11 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The agriculture, automotive, health care, minerals, real estate, renewable energy, technology and tourism agreements were made at the 10th Arab-China Business Conference. Last year, Chinese-Saudi trade reached a new record volume of $116 billion, a 30 percent increase over the previous year and triple the volume of U.S.-Saudi trade.
China’s involvement with Saudi Arabia and other Middle East nations is part of its Belt and Road Initiative for creating a modern version of the ancient Silk Road trade route that connected China to Europe. The initiative includes a series of transport and connectivity infrastructure spanning thousands of miles. This project is leading to the fulfillment of Isaiah 23, which prophesies the rise of a “mart of nations” that will use its transcontinental economic power to the extreme detriment of the United States.
Anglo-America
The United States is suffering a cold civil war. Political polarization between conservatives and liberals is worse than it has been in more than a century, up to and including attempts to try, arrest and jail the opposing political leader. On June 8, Joe Biden’s Department of Justice succeeded in getting a federal grand jury to indict Donald Trump on 31 counts of violations of the Espionage Act of 1917. It conspicuously omits any mention of the Presidential Records Act, which allows former presidents to access both classified and unclassified documents after leaving office. Trump pleaded not guilty on June 13 in a Florida federal court.
The timing of the indictment is suspicious: It was issued just hours after Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray finally allowed members of Congress to view an FD-1023 document stating that Joe Biden accepted a $5 million bribe from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where his son Hunter Biden was a highly paid board member. It appears that the man controlling the Biden regime, Barack Obama, timed the Trump indictment as a distraction from one of the greatest presidential corruption scandals in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, radical Democrats continue transforming the U.S. military. Joe Biden announced on May 25 that he is nominating Air Force Gen. Charles Brown Jr. to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Brown is the first black American to lead a branch of the armed forces. He also supports the corrupt neo-Marxist movement Black Lives Matter. In 2022, alongside Undersecretary of the Air Force Gina Ortiz Jones (the first Filipino lesbian in her role), General Brown signed a shocking document enacting quotas to limit the share of white male officers to 43 percent. Currently, 86 percent of Air Force pilots are white men. This may indicate how General Brown will command all U.S. armed forces.
A prophecy in Ezekiel 5:12 describes a time when one third of the people in end-time Israel (the United States and Britain primarily) would die in a devastating civil war brought about by the vile sins of the people. America’s cold civil war is about to go hot as its political parties turn on each other and its military disintegrates.
