On this website we have written a good deal about the Balkan Peninsula’s post-Cold War history. We have noted the early collusion of both Germany and the Vatican in their effort to draw the Balkans into a position where the region would eventually come under European Union control. We have highlighted the geostrategic fact of the Balkans being the crossroads to Europe—and hence of the need for the EU, dominated by Germany, to secure that territory before being able to effectively advance its eastward and southward hegemony in pursuit of its globalist, corporatist, imperialist agenda.

Like our mentor, Herbert Armstrong, we have continued to predict, as he did from the time of Germany’s defeat by the Allies in 1945, that Germany would unite to rise again and head yet one more, final resurrection of the old Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

To understand what is happening in Kosovo today, one needs to see it within the setting of the accelerating unification of Europe that has occurred since Germany reunited after the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989.

The Trumpet has often pointed to the significance of the first foreign-policy decision made by Germany a year after its official recognition as a unified nation on Oct. 3, 1990. Against the wishes of the United Nations, Germany unilaterally declared on Dec. 23, 1991, that it would recognize the breakaway Yugoslav states of Slovenia and Croatia as independent nations. That action triggered the very effect that it was calculated to achieve: the entire breakup of the Republic of Yugoslavia in preparation for its progressive takeover by the European Union. That takeover opens up the opportunity for the EU’s continuing eastward and southern evolution into the German-dominated imperial power that it is destined to become.

The last remaining thorn in the flesh of this Teutonic hegemonic EU vision is the burning issue of Kosovo with its recent claim to independence under Albanian rule. Russia and Serbia are stoutly resisting recognition of an independent Kosovo.

The United States has been the lapdog of the EU since America fought—and largely paid for—the illegal war that ended with the handover of most of old Yugoslavia to EU control. On Monday it announced that “Kosovo is never going to be part of Serbia again.” The sheer political arrogance and the gross ignorance of a millennium of Serbian history that this statement from a U.S. State Department spokesman reveals just boggles the mind. Then again, whenever was post-Reagan U.S. foreign policy anything but demonstrably ignorant of the facts of history?

In a veiled reference to Washington’s consideration of enacting its stale and largely worthless tactic of imposing sanctions on nations that fail to bow to its will, State Department spokesman Tom Casey followed up with, “‘We don’t want to isolate Serbia’ … adding that the United States wanted Serbia to be able to achieve ambitions to be a part of Europe. ‘We think that is the future of the country and we hope that is the direction its leadership wants to take it in’” (Reuters, February 25).

Serbian commentator Srdja Trifkovic, with a special eye to Serbia’s history under an earlier Holy Roman imperialist regime, condemned America’s all-too-ready recognition of the EU-backed declaration of independence of Kosovo in bitter terms: “The grotesque charade in Pristina on Sunday, February 17, crowned a decade and a half of U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia that has been mendacious and iniquitous in equal measure. By encouraging its Albanian clients go ahead with the unilateral proclamation of independence written at the Department of State, the U.S. administration has made a massive leap into the unknown. That leap is potentially on par with Austria’s July 1914 ultimatum to Serbia. The fruits will be equally bitter. While their exact size and taste are hard to predict right now, that in the fullness of time America will come to regret the criminal folly of her current leaders is certain” (Chronicles,February 17).

In a direct response to the EU- and U.S.-led recognition of independent Kosovo, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, bolstered by the high-profile visit to Belgrade by Russian president-in-waiting Dmitri Medvedev, announced Monday: “Serbia will do everything to implement its jurisdiction and state prerogatives for all loyal citizens in Kosovo—Serbs and non-Albanians. There cannot be normalization of relations with the states that recognised Kosovo independence until they annul their decision. Protest rallies will not stop as long as illegal independence is not annulled.” Reuters reported that Kostinica has declared that he “intends to rule parts of Kosovo where ‘loyal citizens’ still look to Belgrade for government” (op. cit.). Medvedev affirmed that Russia will continue to regard the nation of Serbia as inclusive of “all of its territory.” This obviously includes the rump eastern state of Montenegro as well as Kosovo.

The scene is set for the raising of current tensions to crisis point between the U.S.-backed European Union and Russia over the future of this Balkan enclave of Kosovo. There’s a lot more at stake here than just the future of the tiny southern province of Serbia.

Stratfor’s Dr. George Friedman highlighted the geopolitical importance of this event. “Kosovo’s independence declaration is an important event for two main reasons. First, it potentially creates a precedent that could lead to redrawn borders in Europe and around the world. Second, it puts the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany in the position of challenging what Russia has defined as a fundamental national interest—and this at a time when the Russians have been seeking to assert their power and authority. Taken together, each of these makes this a geopolitically significant event” (February 20; emphasis mine throughout).

Friedman foresees Kosovo’s declaration of independence possibly lighting a fuse to the Balkan powder keg yet again. He points to the dangers of a ripple effect within the Balkan Peninsula. “But partitioning Kosovo could be only the beginning. A dangerous precedent has been set for the approximately 2 million Bosnian Serbs to campaign for a merger with Serbia and set off another powder keg in the Balkans for the European Union and nato to deal with. The Bosnian Serbs, who live in Republika Srpska, have been threatening for years to split from Bosnia proper, especially as the Kosovo issue heated up. [T]he Bosnian Serbs tend to take their cues from Belgrade and Moscow. If Serbia and Russia gave the word, the Bosnian Serbs would leap at the chance not only to break from the Bosnian Muslims and Croats but also to return to Serbia, creating a Greater Serbia” (February 25).

Given the huge significance of the event of Kosovo’s independence, it’s amazing how quickly it left the headlines. In a search of the newswires and major organs of the press a day after Tom Casey had condemned Kosovo to segregation from Serbia forever, little or nothing turned up on this “geopolitically significant event.” It’s as though the world sees it as a done deal.

It is not.

Kosovo is not going to go away. It is going to come back and hit the perpetrators of this grave injustice done to a sovereign independent state powerfully over the head. What the West seems to be largely ignoring—or more correctly, is grossly ignorant of—is that on the matter of Kosovo, Russia is right!

One of the most scathingly articulate reviews of the Kosovo situation was rendered by British journalist Melanie Phillips in her Sunday blog for the Spectator magazine.

Phillips, in her uniquely cutting style, wrote, “The decision by Britain, America and certain other European countries to recognize Kosovo as an independent state is mind-blowingly stupid and suicidal and of a piece with their obvious determination to capitulate in the war for civilization. It is a rotten decision …” (February 24). This admirably politically incorrect commentator condemns the illegality of the Albanian majority’s declaration of independence thus: “Serbia is a properly constituted democratic country. To recognize the validity of such a secession is to undermine the principle of a country’s right to determine its own composition. [I]nternational law … explicitly recognizes Serbian authority over Kosovo and upholds a state’s right to its own sovereignty. It opens the way for any other breakaway movement to do the same, both in the Balkans and around the world” (ibid.). Thus Phillips endorses Friedman’s view, which any mind committed to plain common sense should be able to recognize.

Clearly, a dangerous precedent has been set.

But Phillips makes one other profound observation about the Kosovo declaration of independence: “It asserts that religion matters more than nationality. … It says in effect that nationality is not the glue that must bind people of different creeds together, but religion …” (ibid.).

That is exactly the point … the Holy Roman point!

It is in the name of the Holy Roman religion that the Vatican recognized the independence of the majority Catholic nations of Slovenia and Croatia 16 years ago. It was in the name of that religion that Croats, immediately upon gaining endorsement of their declarations of independence from Germany and the Vatican in 1991, resumed the slaughter of Serbs that they had begun in World War ii. The fact that Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians, armed with German-supplied weaponry, went on a similar rampage only served the cause of those elements within the EU who saw the Serbs as antipathetic to their imperialist goals. It ought to be noted that the term “ethnic cleansing” is not of Serbian origin. It is an English translation of a Catholic Croatian term!

Religion has always trumped nationality in the Holy Roman Empire. In the final analysis, this rising imperial EU power will prove to be no different. Religion will prove to be the only glue that will hold its unwieldy conglomerate of disparate nations together for what will prove to be that continually resurrecting Holy Roman Empire’s brief, and final, moment in history.

The simple fact is, Muslim Albanians, Bosnians and Orthodox Serbs will soon find that, as in past history, they are faced with a life-and-death choice: Convert to the religion of Rome at the point of a sword, or die by that same sword! Powerful yet-to-be-fulfilled Bible prophecies back that statement up! (Read our booklet Germany and the Holy Roman Empire for the link between history and prophecy on this subject.)

In the meantime, one thing is for sure. The only way to maintain any semblance of order within the newly independent Kosovo is through a third party bearing arms on its soil to enforce the peace. The EU is already in action on that front.

“There are 17,000 nato-led troops in Kosovo and they have now taken control of that [northern] part of the border. … Now the UN mission that has been in Kosovo since the end of the war in 1999 should start to wind down and a big EU mission start to wind up. … So while Kosovo’s declaration of independence ends a chapter, its new ‘final status’ is likely to prove merely another chapter in the same book, not the longed-for beginning of a new volume. Few Kosovar Albanians understand this. The eight years in which Kosovo was a UN protectorate may well be followed by a period as an EU protectorate” (Economist,February 21). The Albanians have been duped, drawn right into the open maw of the EU. The Serbs, despite Russian protests, must ultimately follow, or themselves come under the gun of the developing EU military machine which would simply enforce their status as either an EU state or protectorate.

How Russia will deal with this is anyone’s guess at this point. Once the distraction of the Russian elections is out of the way, Germany and Russia must meet a compromise on this point.

One thing is for sure: The great Balkan game is in the process of finishing just as it started—with the creation of a crisis, this time in Kosovo. As British political economist Rodney Atkinson has stated, the Germans are expert at creating a crisis and then imposing their solution on it. The final major crisis point in their sealing up the Balkan Peninsula is, it seems, now created by Berlin/Brussels playing the last Balkan domino in its game with Belgrade/Moscow over the Serbian province of Kosovo.

The U.S. is patently not interested in being directly embroiled in another skirmish in the Balkans. As far as America is concerned, this is a European problem, and as such it’s up to the EU, with its surrogate defense and security organization, nato—under increasingly strong influence from the EU—to maintain order in Kosovo.

Watch for Kosovo to be high on the agenda at the nato summit in April, and watch for Germany to powerfully influence the outcome.

In the meantime, keep your eye on Russia for a typical surprise move. It may involve a trade-off with the EU involving Ukraine, an ex-Soviet nation keen to join the EU.

Srdja Trifkovic muses, “God sometimes acts in mysterious ways, and on this 21st Century Day of Infamy, February 17, we should ask for His mercy and thank Him for His blessings. Kosovo had remained Serbian during those five long centuries of Ottoman darkness, to be liberated in 1912. It is no less Serbian now …” (op. cit.).

He makes an interesting point. For it is Almighty God who sets up nations and allows at times even the basest of men to rule them (Daniel 4:17).

It was the power of Almighty God that created the nations by giving them the foundation of their national tongues and placing them behind natural barriers as borders between them with the intention that the races would remain separate (Genesis 11:7–8).

It will be the Eternal God who puts down the menace that the Holy Roman Empire has been to Europe and the world for two millennia, once and for all, together with all of the imperial ambitions of man (Daniel 2:44-45).

It will be that same God who enforces peace, finally, upon mankind, and welds them into unity, though maintaining their unique God-given ethnic separateness, with the glue of His one, singular, pure religion under the rule of the living Jesus Christ—forever! (Isaiah 9:6-7).

For more on this exciting vision of the future, read our booklet The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like.