Much publicity is being given to the drawdown of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. As to the strength of commitment to and the true nature of the drawdown, we shall have to wait to see what U.S. plan will emerge in the wake of the recent U.S. presidential elections.

Yet we ought to remember that there are other nations that have also committed troops to Afghanistan out of strategic interests of their own. Take Germany, for instance, the third-largest contributor of troops to the Afghanistan war.

As our editor in chief explained in a recent Key of David television presentation, Germany has been busy for some time building an alliance with the less militant Arab states on Iran’s western flank. From the Mediterranean to the Gulf, an alliance is being cemented by Germany to counteract the further spread of its influence over key oil states.

Gerald Flurry explains this is powerfully prophetic, being the fulfillment of the alliance between Germany and certain Arab states that is prophesied in Psalm 83. The initial revelation of that prophecy is unique to him.

With this bastion of resistance to Iran’s westward spread of its influence in the region now consolidating, the other area that needs shoring up by those who seek to contain Iran’s hegemonic initiatives is its eastern flank. This is where the outcome of the Afghanistan war becomes crucial.

U.S. withdrawal from Iraq has left that benighted nation at the mercy of Iran. To all intents and purposes, Iraq is speedily becoming a vassal state to Iran. This leaves Afghanistan as the only outpost remaining between Iran’s eastward expansion and its linkage with Islamic states to its east and south. It is thus crucial for those nations dependent on Middle Eastern and Caucasus oil supplies to arrest Iran’s eastward expansionist goals at its eastern flank.

America’s progressive withdrawal from Afghanistan risks a repeat of the Iraqi episode, with that Eurasian nation falling under Iranian imperialist dominance.

Enter Germany.

Supplying the third-largest contingent of troops in the Afghan war, Germany has a most vital interest in restraining Iranian moves to secure vital oil supplies on which the EU nations are dependent in order to diversify supply away from the singular risky source of Russia. It is for this reason that we have consistently maintained that Germany cannot afford to leave Afghanistan in the wake of American drawdown.

A quick review of Germany’s strategic commitments in the region reveals that it has become increasingly situated to fill the gap created by U.S. withdrawal from this region. In fact, the militarily strategic deployment of the Bundeswehr to the Middle East and the Eurasian periphery is an indication of just how vital such deployment is to Germany’s imperialist goals.

Via its quiet engagement in encircling the oil golden triangle in the Middle East—the German Navy being deployed in the Mediterranean, thus securing Suez, and patrolling off the coast of Lebanon securing the Levant, the German military in Sudan, the navy off the Somalian and Yemeni coastlines securing the Persian Gulf, and the military active in Afghanistan—Germany is in a prime position to present itself in the role of an in-area peacekeeper in this hottest spot on the planet.

Germany also, via strategic deployment in these localities, retains a prime bargaining position for access to Mideast oil as an offset to dependence on Russia. At the same time, it maintains an actively deployed strategic readiness to secure future Middle East oil assets and guarantee safe passage to the black gold via Suez and the Adriatic Sea—the one protected by German naval deployment securing the Mediterranean, the other by virtue of an implicit alliance with Albania, one of Germany’s Balkan proxies.

Thirdly, and soon to be most important of all, Germany’s deployment in Afghanistan gives it a prime strategic location from which to press the inevitable attack on the one nation that threatens the overall stability of the Middle East and, through its terror-sponsoring activities, the rest of the world—Iran!

Germany’s ambivalence to any moral standard in the conduct of its activities in Afghanistan, let alone any other theater vital to its national interest, is readily shown in the strategy it has adopted in the Hindu Kush. In this situation, as in the Balkan Peninsula wars of the 1990s, it is not the moral argument so much as the strategic imperialist/military reason that dominates.

“To vanquish its enemy, Germany has regularly cooperated with forces, which were powerful enough to win wars, but whose social qualities are diametrically opposed to a humane development in the region targeted by German interventions. This had been the case in Afghanistan in the 1980s when, within the framework of the Western alliance, the Federal Republic of Germany helped support the Afghan Mujahedeen fighting pro-Soviet forces in Kabul and the Soviet Army. The consequences are well known. … A similar outcome can be expected from Berlin’s current cooperation with Afghan warlords to maintain control at the Hindu Kush …. This brutalization of social relations corresponds to the logic of warfare, in as much as, not the most humane, but the most barbaric forces are the more promising allies, who, in the long run, become the most influential forces shaping the future” (German-Foreign-Policy.com, November 1).

Keep watching for Germany to strengthen its encirclement of Iran, the biblical king of the south, and to close in on Jerusalem, surrounding it with armies (Luke 21:20). This is a most powerful sign of the imminence of Jesus Christ’s return!