Over 40 million copies of Herbert W. Armstrong’s books and booklets were distributed worldwide during the 20th century. His most popular title was The United States and Britain in Prophecy. Six million people requested the book from the mid-1930s to the late-1980s. Mr. Armstrong’s last version of the book was printed in 1980. Here is what he wrote nearly three decades ago about our once-mighty nations:

Between them the British and the American peoples had acquired more than two-thirds—almost three-fourths—of all the cultivated physical resources and wealth of the world. All other nations combined possessed barely more than a fourth. Britannia ruled the waves—and the world’s commerce was carried on by water. The sun never set on British possessions.Now think!Could the British and American peoples be ignored in prophecies of world conditions that fill a third of the entire Bible—when some 90 percent of all those prophecies pertain to national and international world happenings of our time, now?Staggering?Indeed it is. And yet, precisely as prophesied, Britain’s sun has now set. As these same prophecies that foretold Britain’s greatness revealed far in advance, Britain has already been reduced to a second-rate or third-rate power in the world.And the United States? Today America finds herself heir to just about all the international problems and headaches in this post-World-War-ii, chaotic, violent world. And the United States has won her last war—even little North Vietnam held her at bay. Many other nations sap America’s national strength, “and he knoweth it not,” as God long ago foretold!

At the outset of the Reagan-Thatcher era, those comments might have seemed like a stretch to some. But they certainly can’t be brushed aside as hyperbole today! As Anthony Browne wrote in yesterday’sDaily Mail, “The global power shift from the West to the East is no longer just a matter of debate confined to learned journals and newspaper columns—it is a reality that is beginning to have a huge impact on our daily lives” (emphasis mine throughout). Everyone is now being impacted by this massive shift in global power. Browne continued,

The dire warnings from the International Monetary Fund this week that the West now faces the largest financial shock since the Great Depression, while the Asian economies are still powering ahead, simply underlines our vulnerability in this new world order.The desperately weakened American dollar appears to be on the verge of losing its global dominance, in the same way as sterling lost it a lifetime ago.

Mr. Armstrong also prophesied about this economic crash decades ago. The UK possessed two thirds of the world’s gold supply in 1950, he wrote in The United States and Britain in Prophecy, “while the United States had three times as much gold reserve as the total for the rest of the world. But by 1966 the U.S. gold supply had been drained so much that the dollar was in serious jeopardy.”

In the 1972 version of his book, Mr. Armstrong said “the 1800s belonged to Britain” while “the 1900s belong[ed] to America.” Together, these two allied “brothers” reached their zenith of power around 1950. But they have been in sharp decline ever since, as Mr. Armstrong noted in 1980,

How great, how powerful, and how wealthy did the British and American people become? And what is suddenly happening to us now? Why has Britain already lost most of her colonies—her possessions—her resources, wealth, power and influence in the world? Why is Britain no longer considered Great Britain—a great world power?Why is the United States now discredited, despised, hated throughout so much of the world?

Compare that with what Anthony Browne wrote just yesterday:

Just as the 19th century was the British century, and the 20th century was the American century, the 21st century is the Asian century.But the handover of global power from the UK to the U.S. was trivial compared to what is happening now.The U.S. was Britain’s offspring, based on the same values and the same language. It, too, was an Anglo-Saxon country, and passing the baton across the Atlantic ensured the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon world order, based on democracy, free trade and a belief in human rights, upheld through international institutions that both powers supported.But the world order we have grown used to—and comfortable with—over the last century is coming to an end.

Yes, the Day of Reckoning is here, as Patrick Buchanan warned with the title of his most recent book. “It is the belief of the author and premise of this book,” Buchanan wrote last year, “that America is indeed coming apart, decomposing, and that the likelihood of her survival as one nation through mid-century is improbable—and impossible if America continues on her current course. For we are on a path to national suicide.”

Mr. Armstrong, however, wrote about our “day of reckoning” in all his editions of The United States and Britain in Prophecy. In 1980, he wrote, “God warns us through prophecy that our sins are fast increasing. And now the day of reckoning is here! The foreign sword always has attacked us.”

Sobering words indeed—and proclaimed for more than 50 years by Herbert W. Armstrong in The United States and Britain in Prophecy. You owe it to yourself to join 6 million others who read the 20th century’s most important book on Bible prophecy. You can read it online here. If you would like a free printed copy of the book, send us a request.

America’s Aging Infrastructure

Earlier this year, when President Bush worked with House Democrats to develop an economic stimulus package built around generous rebates for taxpayers, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee criticized the plan. He argued that the money would be better spent on rebuilding and repairing America’s infrastructure—its public highways, bridges, tunnels, utilities and water systems, etc. Not only would the plan strengthen the nation’s aging infrastructure, Huckabee argued, it would also create jobs.

Of course, many arguments can be made about how the government should spend its money. And technically speaking, there’s no money left to spend. But the point about America’s aging infrastructure is legitimate. Even before last year’s lethal collapse of a Minnesota bridge, Time magazine wrote, “commuters in crowded corridors from Atlanta to northern Virginia knew that our infrastructure needed investment and that capacity hadn’t kept pace with demand.” Notice what Bob Herbert wrote yesterday in the New York Times:

The U.S., once the greatest can-do country on the planet, now can’t seem to do anything right. The great middle class has maxed out its credit cards and drained dangerous amounts of equity from family homes. No one can seem to figure out how to generate the growth in good-paying jobs that is the only legitimate way of putting strapped families back on their feet.The nation’s infrastructure is aging and in many places decrepit. Rebuilding it would be an important source of job creation, but nothing on the scale that is needed is in sight. To get a sense of how important an issue this is, consider New Orleans.The historian Douglas Brinkley, who lives in New Orleans, has written: “What people didn’t yet fully comprehend was that the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, was a man-made debacle, resulting from poorly designed levees and floodwalls.”

Here again, in The United States and Britain in Prophecy, Mr. Armstrong wrote at length about the precipitous decline of our once proud and prosperous industrial and manufacturing districts. In 1950, for example, the United States produced more than half of the world’s supply of petroleum. “Together,” Mr. Armstrong wrote, “the British Commonwealth and America produced, in 1950, three-fourths of the world’s steel.”

Today, the U.S. and Britain are dependent on foreigners for most of their petroleum and steel supplies. And prices are skyrocketing due to the sharp increase in demand coming from places like China. As the Daily Mail article, quoted above, noted,

China is spending 35 times as much on crude oil as it did eight years ago, and 23 times as much on copper.As it builds gleaming skyscrapers on its fields, China alone consumes half the world’s cement and a third of its steel.What is happening is so extraordinary that economists have had to invent a new word for it—this is not an economic cycle, but a supercycle, a shift in the world economy of historic proportions.When demand increases and supply stands still, prices shoot up. Iron, wheat and oil are all at record prices, despite slackening demand in the faltering Western economies.

These harsh realities make it that much more difficult for America to rebuild its aging infrastructure. “It hasn’t helped,” Time wrote, “that thanks to the surging price of materials like petroleum and steel, the cost to build highways has jumped 43 percent since the beginning of 2004.”

Iran Wages War—America Winks

Al Qaeda isn’t the top threat to Iraq, U.S. officials said Friday—Iran is. This has apparently become clear after a recent surge in violence in Basra and Baghdad. The Washington Postreported,

Evidence of an increase in Iranian weapons, training and direction for the Shiite militias that battled U.S. and Iraqi security forces in those two cities has fixed new U.S. attention on what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates [Friday] called Tehran’s “malign” influence, the officials said. …During their Washington visit, [Gen. David] Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker barely mentioned al-Qaeda in Iraq but spoke extensively of Iran.

But this is hardly breaking news. TheTrumpet.com has been tracking Iran’s infiltration into Iraq since right after Saddam Hussein’s fall. The Post piece itself said that “Iran has long been seen as a spoiler in Iraq” because of its strong ties to the Shiite groups within the nation. The associations are so strong, the article said, “that other Arab countries have begun to regard Iraq as almost a client state of Iran.”

What is remarkable isn’t Iran’s meddling in Iraq—an oil-rich, politically unstable neighbor with a Shiite majority, ripe pickings for a state with regional ambitions as broad as Iran’s. The remarkable thing is that the U.S. has permitted this to happen. Track back through the Trumpet archives on this subject: Iran has been waging a direct war against the U.S. ever since Saddam’s statue fell in 2003. Yet Washington (accusations of cowboyism notwithstanding) has chosen to overlook this evidence and pretend it is at war only with rogue, non-state-aligned terror groups. The Post piece had this paragraph about President Bush after hearing the “news” of the Iranian threat:

[H]e also reaffirmed that he has no desire to go to war with Tehran. Saying that his job is to “solve these issues diplomatically,” Bush suggested heightened interest in reaching a solution with other countries. “You can’t solve these problems unilaterally. You’re going to need a multilateral forum.”

Of course, diplomatic efforts and multilateral forums have been the order of the day for five years. Iran has only come out stronger—to the point where now it is stepping up its attacks on allied forces.

Washington, however, views a strike on Iran as impractical for a number of reasons, including the hostility among the American public to any expansion of U.S. war-making in the Middle East. Another of these reasons was explained in a Middle East Times editorial this past week: the dependence of U.S. ground forces on supply lines that are controlled by Shiite militias sympathetic to Iran.

The U.S. public and the mainstream media [appear] unaware of how much the U.S. Army’s supply lines through southern Iraq are vulnerable to a general Shiite rising, a fact not lost on the professionals in the U.S. Armed Forces. That explains why three successive commanders of centcom—U.S. Central Command—have flatly opposed launching any major air strikes against the Iranian nuclear facilities while a large contingent of the U.S. ground army is in Iraq. They are: Gen. Anthony Zinni, Gen. John Abizaid, and most recently, Adm. William “Fox” Fallon. … Even Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who currently looks certain to claim the Republican presidential nomination and then run as the heir to his old arch-rival Bush, has now publicly opposed launching air strikes on Iran. … He recognizes that it is the very presence of such a large U.S. military force in Iraq that rules out major air strikes on Iran as a viable option.

That Iran is the greatest cause for unrest in Iraq—and that the United States cannot stop it because it is counting on Iran’s help to stabilize the country—is truly extraordinary. Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction.

Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s prophetically based forecast that Iraq would come under Iran’s influence, made back in December 1994, edges ever closer to fulfillment.

How Not to Fight a War on Terrorism

The legal trial of terrorist Abu Qatada in Britain has taken a silly turn. Qatada’s links to the global most-wanted list of terror are impressive: they include, in the words of the Brussels Journal, “onetime leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, Bin Laden’s onetime UK representative Khaled Al Fawwez, and Rachid Ramda who was involved in the 1995 Paris metro bombing, as well as Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, and Chechnya’s Mujahadin.” Nevertheless, the Journal reports,

the Court of Appeal has now declared that he cannot be deported to his home country of Jordan, due to concerns about his human rights.

That’s right: Qatada’s human rights.

Having secured a “Memorandum of Understanding” between Britain and Jordan, which agrees that he will not be tortured, the government believed that it would have little problem deporting Qatada, but the Court has argued that if a trial were held in that country witnesses against him might first be tortured—and thus it would not be a fair trial, and a clear breach of his human rights. The Home Office will undoubtedly appeal the verdict to the House of Lords, but Britain’s track record for detaining terrorists is not promising. Rights have come increasingly to trump that old fashioned notion of responsibility to the wider community, and judges in recent years seem to have transformed themselves into moral nursemaids, worried for the rights and safety of criminals, but not, it seems, their victims—potential or actual.

At the heart of this inordinate concern for individuals such as Abu Qatada is the belief that, if Britain shows itself sensitive in this way, other terrorists or potential terrorists will recognize Britain as a nation fundamentally friendly to their cause and thus not worth attacking. This notion is not only utterly false, it leaves individuals like Qatada on British soil. As Melanie Phillips documented in her book Londonistan, this policy has turned Britain into an asylum for some of the world’s most dangerous purveyors of Islamist hatred. Because of the freedom with which they are able to operate in Britain, numerous radical groups—including arms of al Qaeda—have planted their headquarters or significant operations there. Says Phillips, “UK-based terrorists have carried out operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Russia, Spain and the United States.” Consider this list of infamous Islamists: the murderer of journalist Daniel Pearl; al Qaeda members who sought to target U.S. financial centers; the man who rammed an explosive-laden truck into police barracks in Kashmir; shoe-bomber Richard Reid; suicide bombers who blew up Israelis in a Tel Aviv bar; one of the masterminds behind two attacks in Bali. All these terrorists called England their home.

For more on how sick Britain has become because of the soft-headed thinking behind this Court of Appeal decision, read “The Sickness in Britain’s Heart.”

Rewarding Bad Behavior

A new housing bill stewing in Congress will reward the irresponsible and greedy folks largely responsible for precipitating the crashing U.S. housing market, says J.D. Foster at the Washington Times. The bill includes:

Bailouts to irresponsible borrowers, many of whom lied on their mortgage applications and/or bought homes at ridiculous prices hoping to flip them before the party ended. Tax credit subsidies to supplement the down payments of buyers looking for a steal on a foreclosed home. And a little slush fund for state and local governments to reward their favorite local builder or bank by taking empty properties off their hands at above-market prices.

Don’t worry; the millions of dollars needed to reward the bad behavior will not burden the cash-strapped American government.

And who pays for this bailout? Not “the government.” It’s all the responsible homeowners and renters who resisted the temptations of the housing boom, refused taking out a home equity loan to fund a vacation or new bmw, declined to buy a home with no down payment, ignored the low teaser rates dangled by shyster brokers. Meanwhile, the homeowners who yielded to temptation are offered an escape hatch. Who pays? In short, you pay—unless you’re getting a bailout.

Foster concludes with a noteworthy observation:

And if we’re going to bail out lenders who went for the fast buck, builders who rode the good times train up the hill and are now in a downward slide, and borrowers who lied or just made bad decisions, where does it stop? How about a bailout for the pensioners and shareholders who have lost money in the stock market in the last two or three years? A proposal for a refundable tax credit for capital losses is just around the corner.

That’s a good question: Where will the bailouts stop? Rewarding bad behavior is the surest way of perpetuating it.

Taiwan Inches Closer to China

Just three weeks after Ma Ying-jeou and Vincent Siew became president-elect and vice-president-elect of Taiwan, they are already busy pulling their nation closer to mainland China. Siew met with Chinese President Hu Jintao on Saturday to discuss bilateral ties and trade relations between Taiwan and mainland China. This was the first case of high-level contact between a Taiwanese and a Chinese official since China’s Communist Revolution in 1949.

Taiwan’s vice president-elect left for home Sunday buoyed by a landmark meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao aimed at opening a new era in relations between the often fractious neighbors.Vincent Siew’s time with Hu may have been short—20 minutes behind closed doors—but it was the highest-level contact between China and Taiwan in the six decades since the island split from the mainland in 1949.”I hope the Boao forum can help spur the future development of trade and economic relations between Taiwan and China,” Siew told reporters, referring to the regional gathering that provided the venue for his encounter with Hu.

New Name, Same Bias

Created in March 2006, the United Nations Humans Rights Council was supposed to replace the blatantly anti-Semitic UN Human Rights Commission, which spent most of its days (in the words of the National Post) “criticizing Israel for alleged crimes against the Palestinians while conveniently overlooking the (actual) crimes against humanity being perpetrated by its own members.”

It’s clear the difference, however, is in name only: The organization’s anti-Israel bias flows as swift as ever. “By the end of its first year of existence, the council had passed nine resolutions condemning Israel—and had not spoken out against another country,” the Postnoted. “In June, 2006, it voted unanimously to establish a special rapporteur on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a resolution sponsored (surprise, surprise) by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.”

Filling the post of “special rapporteur” between Israel and the Palestinians will be law-professor Richard Falk, who comes to his job saddled with a history of prejudice against Israel. “In his writings, he has repeatedly criticized the Jewish state for waging what he calls a ‘holocaust’ against Palestinians. Indeed, in 2007 he published a paper entitled, ‘Slouching toward a Palestinian holocaust.’”

The UN has consistently served as an echo chamber of anti-Semitism. Hatred for the nation of Israel and for Jews is seeping into every nook and cranny of the planet. Few understand why. If you’re interested in learning about the roots of one of history’s longest and most misunderstood ideologies, read Chapter 4 of Gerald Flurry’s booklet The Key of David.

Elsewhere on the Web

The International Herald Tribune writes today about how banks and lenders are freezing home equity lines of credit en masse. It was easy access to money that boomed the economy in recent years. Now a huge source of easy money is disappearing. Without home equity lines of credit, people will no longer be able to use their homes like atm machines—withdrawing cash to make home improvements, send the kids to college, go on vacations, or pay the daily bills. Frozen home equity lines will intensify the consumer spending downturn and put additional pressure on an already weak economy.

General Electric caused a stock market panic when it cut its profit forecast and announced a 6 percent drop in first-quarter profits. Its stock plunged 15 percent and $55 billion of its value disappeared. The Sunday Timessays Citigroup and Merrill Lynch will write down another $15 billion in subprime mortgages, just three months after its $18 billion write-off.

The dollar reached its lowest point ever against the euro this week: $1.5913. The EU’s top economic official, EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, has responded to the economic news by presenting Europe as a stabilizing force for the world economy: “Non-EU countries increasingly perceive the euro area and the EU as a whole as a pole of stability, a source of new capital, and also a source of advice and expertise on regulatory approaches.” As the value of the U.S. markets vaporizes, we can expect to see rest of the world take Europe up on its offer.

We have often written about the very real problems with today’s education system. Mark Steyn points out that one reason these problems are not being solved is that the government is too busy focusing on imaginary issues.

Nearly 60 percent of Israelis believe their government is secretly negotiating the division of Jerusalem with Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, even though government officals often deny that such talks are happening.

And Finally …

Pope Benedict xvi paid tribute last Monday to Catholics who died for their faith in Nazi camps and Soviet gulags or who were killed in hate crimes. “[W]e recall Christians felled by the totalitarian violence of communism, of Nazism, those killed in America, in Asia and Oceania, in Spain and Mexico, in Africa. We are ideally retracing the many painful events of the past century,” he said during the service.

Meanwhile, as Benedict heaped praise on Catholics who died “for their faith in Nazi camps” on Monday, the Catholic Church released a very different report detailing a dark chapter in its own history. According to the report, “Forced Labor and the Catholic Church 1939-1945,” Germany’s Roman Catholic Church exploited nearly 6,000 forced laborers during World War ii.

The 703-page report documents the fate of over 1,000 prisoners of war and almost 5,000 civilians who were forced to work for the Nazis in hundreds of Catholic-operated facilities as part of the war effort.