Europe is taking a more competitive, ambitious geopolitical approach. On December 1, the European Commission introduced its Global Gateway Strategy. This project is intended to promote the construction of modern infrastructure in emerging and developing countries. It is “a key initiative of the [European Union] in the systemic competition with China and is the result of years of consultations between the Commission and member states,” Germany’s Handelsblatt noted on November 29 (Trumpet translation throughout). The plan is expected to cost up to $340 billion. Though not as far-reaching as America’s Build Back Better plan or China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Gateway has potential to develop into something massive.

Europe’s ambitions are not altruistic or new. Germany has been working for many years to center world trade around its markets by first uniting Europe under its leadership and then exploiting the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. This plan was forged during World War ii when Nazi Germany calculated for possible defeat. Germany is now methodically carrying it out.

Strengthen Global Influence

“It is the EU’s declared goal to strengthen its global influence,” Handelsblatt noted, quoting German EU Ambassador Michael Clauss as saying, “Global Gateway has the potential to make the EU an effective geopolitical player” and will be “an attractive alternative to the Chinese Silk Road for many partner countries.” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the project “a template for how Europe can build more resilient connections with the world.” Commission Vice President Josep Borrell said, “A stronger Europe in the world means a resolute engagement with our partners, firmly grounded in our core principles.”

The European Commission stated that it plans to finance the project with “a Team Europe approach to scale up resources from the EU institutions, member states with their financial and development institutions, the European Investment Bank (eib), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (ebrd). It will actively seek to mobilize private sector finance and expertise and support access to sustainable finance.”

Yet as Politico noted, “Even if private investors join in, the EU’s spending plan languishes way beneath what it is estimated China is coughing up …. ‘It’s nothing more than a letter of intent, a political statement,’ said one EU official. ‘It sends a strong message to China by emphasizing democracy and values, but more needs to be done to actually implement them.’”

Not everyone is a critic of the project. “For all European companies active in the infrastructure sector, Global Gateway is good news,” said Frank Kehlenbach, head of the Europe and Foreign Construction division at the German Construction Industry Federation. “For far too long, the EU has shied away from launching a program for infrastructure development outside Europe.”

History has an important warning for where Europe’s ambition is leading.

The Plan

Elation from German businessmen is not surprising. German elites have wanted to implement such a strategy since just after World War ii. Germany wants to use Europe’s economy to build a superpower that can act independently from the United States and the Communists.

Before World War ii even ended, Walter Lippmann warned: “If 30 years hence Germany dominates Europe and thus holds the balance of power between Russia and the English-speaking nations, German historians will not count this war as a true defeat.”

“This is a truly prophetic statement,” T.H. Tetens wrote in Germany Plots With the Kremlin. “The only difference between the reality of today and Mr. Lippmann’s fears of a resurrected Germany lies in the timetable. Walter Lippmann would have never dreamed that [former German Chancellor Konrad] Adenauer could declare, five years after Germany’s defeat, that Germany must lead a third power bloc to hold ‘the balance of power between Western democracies and the Soviet Union.’”

Tetens’s book, published in 1953, is filled with warnings about Germany’s goal to transform Europe into a third power bloc between the English-speaking people and the Communists. Though the politicians he referred to in his book have since died, Germany continues to pursue the same plans. Some of Tetens’s warnings are already reality. In the May 20, 1950, Rheinischer Merkur, Adenauer described a united Europe that would share a “long-range economic venture in Africa” and would “become the third force in the world, powerful enough to intervene successfully—in a decisive moment—to safeguard the peace.”

Tetens noted that Adenauer therefore “suggested tapping the riches of strategic raw materials in Africa and creating there, with German technicians and American financial help, a new armament industry for the support of European defense.”

Europe today is united. Factories in the Middle East and Africa are currently manufacturing weapons under European license. In 2018, Andreas Schwer, an internationally acclaimed German military industries expert, was appointed ceo of Saudi Arabian Military Industries.

After World War ii, Spain held onto many Nazi ideas. “The schemers in the Madrid Geopolitical Canter have quite openly described how the United States will be thrown on the rocks,” Tetens wrote. “They are dreaming of building a new third power bloc and declared that this ‘new power combination would plunge the United States down from its present dizzy heights,’ and they boast that it would depend entirely on the ‘diplomatic and propaganda finesses when and how we would take over an America enfeebled by its foreign and domestic policies.’”

Also interesting to note is the following quote from the German publication Christ & Welt, Nov. 1, 1951: “The West German Republic can best be compared with a sailboat cruising toward two islands far on the horizon and, in order to withstand strong-blowing winds, it sets its course alternately to the left and to the right. Will the day then not arrive when we must make a decision on which island to land? Maybe, but it is not certain. Perhaps one of the islands will be washed away before we reach it.”

“All German expectations in that respect center around the United States” as the island being washed away, Tetens wrote.

Germany has retained close relations with the U.S. But how will Germany react when the U.S. financial system collapses? Tetens further noted:

Yet after the Germans have squeezed from us all possible concessions, after they have extorted additional billions of dollars, and after we have relinquished important rights of control, the Germans will turn their backs on us and start their bargaining with the Kremlin. Such a development would not only spell the doom of our whole containment policy in Europe, but it would also result in a new threat by a German-dominated third power bloc.

He further explained that Dr. Adenauer’s ideas of “great regional power blocs” were “advocated by the pan-Germans 60 years ago, and they were rehashed more recently by Adolf Hitler.” The plan was the same then as today. Tetens wrote:

In Dr. Adenauer’s “grandiose concept,” the second phase will be the consolidation of German economic, political and military hegemony over Europe, the expansion of German influence in Africa, followed by a close tie-up to the Arabic world and the Latin American continent. Only after Germany has established a great third power bloc, acting in full independence of the East and West, will she step into the third phase, which is foreseen as close political and economic cooperation with the East.

For this to work, Germany has to prepare by increasing its independence and expanding its global influence. That is what Global Gateway is all about.

Leader of the ‘Third Power Bloc’?

In January 2020, former German Economics Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg stated: “How does the EU or Germany behave as they are faced with [China’s] Belt and Road Initiative? Italy is already a partner in the project, leasing the port in Piraeus to a Chinese consortium. New economic areas are being staked out and dominated by China. Should one watch and do nothing?”

Allowing further advances would increase Europe’s economic dependence on China and possibly aggravate the U.S., which is trying to contain the Chinese regime. “[T]he United States could defend itself by putting tariffs on German products. A dilemma,” Guttenberg said. His solution is clear: Germany needs to set up its own power bloc to free itself from both Chinese influence and American sanctions. What Guttenberg demanded then is what Europe is seeking to do now.

For more than a decade, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has warned that Guttenberg is likely the man who will carry out Germany’s decades-long plans.

At the Crypto Finance Conference in Switzerland on Jan. 17, 2019, Guttenberg said that Europe must form a third power bloc before it is crushed by the others:

One system … you may call the American system, or let’s say the somehow-Western system. The second one is the increasing, and increasingly important, Chinese system. … The third one is a we-don’t-know-where-we-actually-stand system, where the European Union is the core example. …

When we come to the questions I’ve raised at the beginning and we see these competing systems, we see the geopolitical impact that this competition has caused for all of your companies. We have to understand who within those competing systems is currently the leader when it comes to future standard-setting, who will be the one gaining more and more, let’s say, classical impact and power, very often connected to military power.

Guttenberg has called China’s advancement a wake-up call for Europe. In a Plus 4-Talk television interview on July 28, 2019, he said:

Consider their One Belt, One Road Initiative. Here they connect one country after another to them. For a long time, they have been involved in Africa, and that is something we underestimate in Europe and America. Majorities are formed here, and decisions are made as to who sets the standards for regulations, for the Internet, artificial intelligence, the Internet of things and all that. Here you need majorities, and China is creating them, step by step. That’s the wake-up call for Europe.

It is not by chance that the EU is now doing what Guttenberg has long demanded. Guttenberg serves the EU Commission officially as an adviser for Internet freedom, but he also leads the corporate advisory and investment firm Spitzberg Partners and is infamous for his lobbying.

“Well, first of all one shouldn’t become scared, thinking that we have already lost the race,” Guttenberg said. “I think we can have some self-confidence here. Why? We have a well-established industry that still has to be far more connected to the new technologies. But once this happens, it will develop a totally different field of power than a purely technological or digitalization firm. Secondly, we are also independent from both players, the two [China and the U.S.], as some describe it, are already in somewhat of a trade war, definitely in a conflict, in which we as Europeans can take a proactive role.”

Clearly, Guttenberg doesn’t advocate that Germany and Europe should bolster the American system but should rather form their own, independent system. This is historically and prophetically significant.

What the Bible Says

Germany is actively working on a close trade alliance with Latin America, and the EU’s Global Gateway plan could succeed in developing great economic ties with the Middle East and Africa. Consider again Tetens’s warning: “In Dr. Adenauer’s ‘grandiose concept,’ the second phase will be the consolidation of German economic, political and military hegemony over Europe, the expansion of German influence in Africa, followed by a close tie-up to the Arabic world and the Latin America continent. Only after Germany has established a great third power bloc, acting in full independence of the East and West, will she step into the third phase, which is foreseen as close political and economic cooperation with the East.”

This plan remarkably resembles what we see happening before our eyes and what the Bible prophesied thousands of years ago.

Europe today is identified in Revelation 17 and 18 as Babylon, famous for its merchants. In the Old Testament, Isaiah 23 and Ezekiel 27 refer to this empire as the powerful trading center of Tyre. The Bible prophesies that a European economic behemoth will center world trade around itself. The book of Isaiah foretells that Europe will become the “marketplace for the nations” (Isaiah 23:3; New King James Version). The Bible also reveals who will be counted as its major allies.

“Thy borders are in the midst of the seas, thy builders have perfected thy beauty. They have made all thy ship boards of fir trees of Senir: they have taken cedars from Lebanon to make masts for thee. Of the oaks of Bashan have they made thine oars; the company of the Ashurites have made thy benches of ivory, brought out of the isles of Chittim. … Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs. Javan, Tubal, and Meshech, they were thy merchants: they traded the persons of men and the vessels of brass in thy market” (Ezekiel 27:4-6, 12-13).

Isaiah 23 confirms that Europe will ally with the ancient peoples of Chittim, ancestors of the Chinese. The ancient people of Tarshish are now located in Japan and Latin America. The peoples of Tubal and Meshech migrated to Russia. Excluded from this alliance is ancient Israel, who is today primarily the English-speaking peoples and the Jewish state. (Request your free copy of The United States and Britain in Prophecy and read “Ships of Tarshish.”)

Germany is in a trade partnership with all these countries while still claiming a special relationship with the U.S. But this will change. Referring to the gas pipeline that connects Germany directly to Russia, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry warned in “Germany and Russia’s Secret War Against America”: “History shows that Germany and Russia are not actually partners. When they enter into peace deals and economic partnerships, it is a signal that either or both are preparing for some kind of imperialistic exploit. This makes the Nord Stream 2 deal extremely concerning.”

As Mr. Flurry explained, Nord Stream 2 shows that Germany is preparing to enter close relations with Russia. This means that it will soon break from America. But it will not make itself dependent on Asia. That is why it must strengthen its ties to Latin America and Africa.

Germany will successfully use Europe and its trading power to form the “third power bloc.” Ancient prophecy, German history and even analysts from over the past century reveal what is immediately ahead of us. But only the Bible gives hope with the warning.

Request your free copy of Isaiah’s End-Time Vision to understand the full prophetic context of the scriptures referenced above and to learn where these developments are leading. Germany’s economic and imperial goals will ultimately lead to the destruction of many that stand in its path. You can understand why and the hope that lies ahead.