Mexico is vital to United States security. Since the U.S. is protected by the Pacific Ocean in the west and the Atlantic Ocean in the east, its southern border represents the most vulnerable part of its perimeter. Preventing Mexico and the Caribbean islands from allying with foreign enemies has always been vital to U.S. strategy.

This is why recent events south of the Rio Grande are so concerning. Joe Biden sought to put on a show of hemispheric unity last week, but his Summit of the Americas was an absolute disaster. He did not invite Cuba, Nicaragua or Venezuela to the summit due to their abysmal human rights record. But he discovered that many Latin American nations are more loyal to Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela than to the United States. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced that he would not attend the Summit of the Americas after news broke that the Biden administration was not inviting socialist dictators to the meeting.

“There can be no Americas Summit if all the countries of the American continent do not participate,” said López Obrador. “Or there can be, but we believe that means continuing with the politics of old, of interventionism, of a lack of respect for the nations and their people.” Mexico still sent a representative to the event, but López Obrador’s absence was a blow to Biden’s plan. The summit was supposed to show how the U.S. was a leading force in the Western Hemisphere, yet the head of the hemisphere’s third-most populous country did not attend.

Bolivian President Luis Arce also did not show, nor did the presidents of El Salvador, Honduras or Guatemala. All of these leaders told the world that Latin unity is more important than relations with the U.S., and policymakers in Washington, D.C., should be taking note of this development.

Representatives from Cuba and the European Union agreed to a series of new projects in critical sectors such as food security, local community development and digital connectivity. And Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares is calling on his EU peers to swiftly ratify trade accords with Chile, Mexico and the Southern Common Market. Mexico and the various nations of Latin America may soon be tied much closer to a resurgent European superpower than to the United States.

Such a Euro-Latin power bloc is a threat to the United States. No power can besiege the U.S. without economic and military superiority in Latin America. And this is why many historic U.S. rivals, from French Emperor Napoleon iii to German Kaiser Wilhelm ii to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, have sought to pit Latin American nations (mainly Mexico) against the United States. Over 40 percent of all goods imported into the U.S. pass through the Gulf of Mexico, and Mexico would be the best staging ground from which foreign enemies could invade.

The idea of armies invading the U.S. may sound far-fetched, but the Bible says it will happen. In the book of Revelation, the Apostle John saw a vision of a beast that would make war in the end time. He tells us how to identify this beast with the following riddle: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six” (Revelation 13:18).

There have been many conspiracy theories surrounding the number of the beast since the Apostle John penned those words. Still, the correct interpretation of this riddle was given less than a century after John died by Irenaeus of Lyons, a student of the Apostle Polycarp before he joined the Roman Catholic Church.

Today, when people count, they usually use Hindu-Arabic numerals. But in ancient times, people used letters to count. Many are still familiar with Roman numerals, where i is 1, v is 5, x is 10, etc. But fewer know that the Greek and Hebrew alphabets also use letters for numbers. The Apostle John wrote Revelation in Greek, and Irenaeus noted in his book Against Heresies that the letters in the Greek name Lateinos (ΛΑΤΕΙΝΟΣ) sum out to 666; the last of the four kingdoms seen by the Prophet Daniel was the Latin Kingdom.

The late Herbert W. Armstrong expounded upon this identification in his booklet Who or What Is the Prophetic Beast? He noted that Lateinos “signifies ‘Latin man’ or ‘the name of Latium,’ from which region the Romans derived their origin and their language. This word, too, signifies ‘Roman.’ In the Greek, l is 30, a is 1, t is 300, e is 5, i is 10, n is 50, o is 70, s is 200. Count these figures. They count to exactly 666! It is indeed no coincidence that the name of the kingdom, its founder and first king, and of each man in the kingdom, counts to exactly 666!”

King Lateinos founded the kingdom of Latium, which grew into the ancient Roman Empire, transformed into the medieval Holy Roman Empire, and spread across the Atlantic Ocean into the Holy Roman Empire’s Latin American colonies. Even today, many Roman Catholic leaders emphasize that the various ethnic groups spread throughout Latin America share a cultural heritage completely different from Anglo-American heritage.

“Immigration is a key to our American renewal,” wrote Archbishop José Horacio Gómez of Los Angeles just two years ago. “The American story that most of us know is set in New England. It’s the story of the pilgrims and the Mayflower, the first Thanksgiving, and John Winthrop’s sermon about a ‘city upon a hill.’ It’s the story of great men like Washington, Jefferson and Madison. It’s the story of great documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. … But the story of the Founding Fathers and the truths they held to be self-evident is not the whole story about America. The rest of the story starts more than a century before the pilgrims. It starts in the 1520s in Florida and in the 1540s here in California. It is the story not of colonial settlement and political and economic opportunity. It’s the story of exploration and evangelization. This story is not Anglo-Protestant but Hispanic-Catholic. It is centered, not in New England but in Nueva España ….”

This cultural divide that Archbishop Gómez highlighted is the root cause behind the tensions at Joe Biden’s Summit of the Americas. The United States and Canada share an Anglo-American culture that is very different from the Latin culture that binds together Latin America and much of Europe. This fact is significant in Bible prophecy.

“Herbert Armstrong long prophesied, and we expect, the alliance between Europe and South America to grow extremely strong,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry writes in his booklet Isaiah’s End-Time Vision. “The most significant factors that will cement this connection are religion and language: Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion of Latin America, and Spanish is the fourth-most spoken language in the world. But it will not be a union of equals: The Latin American countries will become vassal states to Europe! With a German-led Europe (the king of the north) possessing great maritime power, North America will be surrounded on the east by Europe and the south by Latin America. The Bible contains many prophecies of that European power attacking America.”

The fact that many Latin American nations are willing to boycott a summit led by the U.S. because it excludes Communist Cuba is a reminder of how many of these countries are becoming anti-American. The Bible warns that many of them will likely be part of an end-time resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire. Anyone who has read the bloody history of this empire knows this is terrifying news for the near future. Yet as Revelation 17:14 promises, “the Lamb shall overcome” this empire “for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings.”

To learn more about the central role that the Holy Roman Empire and its allies are prophesied to play in world events, please read our free books Isaiah’s End-Time Vision and Who or What Is the Prophetic Beast?