During his famous “Iron Curtain” speech, Winston Churchill described the alliance between the United States and Britain as a “special relationship.” Midway through the 20th century, that special relationship helped forge the existence of a new Jewish state in the Middle East. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy told Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, “The United States has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East really comparable only to what it has with Britain over a wide range of affairs.”

This brotherhood among three peoples—the Americans, the British and the Jews—has been intimately close the last two centuries because of the historical ties that are rooted in the very first book of the Old Testament—and because of God’s hand in establishing these end-time nations and raising them to unprecedented heights of world power. (This critical historical context is fully explained in Herbert W. Armstrong’s book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.)

Yet, even those who don’t follow theTrumpet.com can see from newspaper headlines that these three nations are, even now, in the midst of an astonishing free fall from their former positions of world dominance. That’s because, just as God prophesied of our rise to power, He also prophesies of our simultaneous fall.

Coinciding with this precipitous decline in world power and influence is the unraveling relationship that once bound these three brothers so tightly together. The Prophet Isaiah described this dramatic unraveling, which occurs just before the latter-day appearance of the prophesied Messiah. “Manasseh shall devour Ephraim,” Isaiah wrote, “and Ephraim Manasseh; Together they shall be against Judah” (Isaiah 9:21, New King James Version).

These three Israelite nations—which have maintained such strong and durable alliances over the course of many generations—were prophesied, in our day, to forsake their special alliance and to engage in furious strife and contention with one another.

That is clearly happening before our eyes.

America Devours Britain, and Britain America

Earlier this week, the United States concluded a deal that allowed four Guantanamo detainees to settle in the British colony of Bermuda. According to several reports, British officials at Downing Street knew nothing about the arrangement Washington made with Britain’s oldest colony.

Said one Labor MP, “The U.S. is clearly determined to act in what it perceives as its own national interest even riding roughshod over what it should have done, which is spoken to the British government” (emphasis mine throughout).

Investors.com wrote that by secretly foisting terrorists off on a British colony, the United States was effectively scrapping its special relationship with the UK.

As our regular readers know, this relationship has been rapidly deteriorating since the beginning of the year. Barely a month into office, President Obama ditched the term “relationship” in favor of “partnership,” when describing America’s association with Britain. This change coincided with the administration rejecting Britain’s offer to extend the loan for the Churchill bust, which had been situated in the Oval Office since 9/11.

Then there was President Obama’s chilly reception for Prime Minister Gordon Brown in early March, which consisted of a 30-minute chat inside the White House. Afterward, as a parting gift, Obama presented Brown with a dvd collection of 25 Hollywood movies. In response to the angry reaction in Britain over President Obama’s royal snub, a White House official excused the slight by saying the new president had been “overwhelmed” by the economic meltdown.

But the real views of Obama’s administration, the Telegraph wrote, were laid bare by one State Department official who helped plan for the Brown visit. “There’s nothing special about Britain,” the Washington insider supposedly said. “You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

The latest U.S.-UK dustup over the Guantanamo detainees certainly attests to that. According to the Independent, Whitehall officials accused the United States of treating Britain “with barely disguised contempt.” It quoted one senior official as saying, “The Americans were fully aware of the foreign-policy understanding we have with Bermuda and they deliberately chose to ignore it. This is not the kind of behavior one expects from an ally.”

Together Against Judah

Even as the United States and Britain exchange blows with one another, there remains one common goal that both of them share: hostility toward Israel.

President Obama’s Cairo speech perfectly summarized Washington’s renunciation of any special relationship it once had with Israel. As noted here last week, in hopes of currying favor with the Muslim world, the Obama administration has effectively decided to abandon its most dependable ally in the Middle East.

Britain has followed a similar course for some time now. Earlier this year, amid widespread European protests against Israel’s operation in Gaza, anti-Semitic hatred and violence was especially ugly in London, of all places, where more than 100,000 protestors took to the streets in open support for Hamas.

More telling than the mass demonstration itself is the astonishing fact that British authorities did nothing in the way of curbing the incitement of hatred toward Jews.

In fact, more and more, Britain’s domestic and foreign policies actually encourage anti-Semitic behavior. Last December, for example, Britain spearheaded an unsuccessful push in the European Union to tie any special favors for Israel directly to the Jewish state’s diplomatic progress with the Palestinians.

That same month, several weeks before President Obama was sworn in, Gordon Brown wrote a letter to the Palestinian Authority prime minister to express his “frustration” over the settlement activity. “The UK is now looking at what effective action we can take to discourage settlement expansion,” Brown wrote.

Also in December, the British government issued an advisory warning to British citizens telling them not to purchase property in East Jerusalem, the West Bank or the Golan Heights—territories 10 Downing Street envisions as a future Palestinian state.

In Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Post wrote, the advisory was viewed “as the latest in a series of less-than-friendly steps toward Israel.”

America against Britain—Britain against America—both of them united only in their blatant hostility toward Israel.

Exactly as Isaiah prophesied.

Yet, despite the unraveling ties that once bound these three brothers together, all three nations are inextricably linked together by another end-time prophecy, which points to our simultaneous downfall (Hosea 5:5). (Be sure to study The United States and Britain in Prophecy. Also, for more on the prophecies of Isaiah, read Isaiah’s End-Time Vision.)

Both prophecies, in fact, are closely related. For the weakening of those once-mighty ties that bound together the United States, Britain and Judah is only making our peoples more vulnerable to the threat of invasion by ascending world powers!