A day of reckoning may have arrived for Europe. The future of the union hangs in the balance. Will Greece stay or go? And who will decide? The implications loom large for America and the world.

The dream of a united Europe under one political authority is as old as the Roman Empire. Six times throughout history—under Justinian, Charlemagne, Otto the Great, Charles v, Napoleon and Hitler—power-hungry men have forced the disparate peoples and nations into a military empire. And each time the combine came crashing down in a wave of blood.

Today, the dream of a united European superpower is about to be realized—again.

When the eurozone’s founders began working toward pan-European unity, they knew it would be virtually impossible to unite the Continent. Jean Monnet, one of the forefathers of the European Union, was well aware of the difficulty of convincing voters to willingly relinquish their national sovereignty. Monnet felt that the only way to achieve unification, without war, was through stealth. The people must not know that sovereignty has been surrendered until it is gone.

English conservative and author Adrian Hilton described Monnet’s intentions for Europe this way: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards a superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation” (The Principality and Power of Europe; emphasis mine throughout).

As Monnet said on April 30, 1952, “The fusion [of economic functions] would compel nations to fuse their sovereignty into that of a single European state.”

Peter Thorneycroft, former chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom and Europhile, described the Monnet unification method in a 1957 Foreign Affairs article:

The idea of a united Europe is not new. It has exercised the minds of the soldiers and sometimes of the statesmen of Europe for many centuries. … Torn by wax and conquest, weakened by internecine strife, Europeans have yet found the time and the capacity to leave an incomparable legacy ….Yet men do not live easily within the same institutional arrangements. National patriotisms are strong ….

In an earlier booklet, Design for Europe (1947), Thorneycroft wrote: “No government dependent upon a democratic vote could possibly agree in advance to the sacrifice which any adequate plan must involve. The people must be led slowly and unconsciously into the abandonment of their traditional economic defenses, not asked, in advance ….”

Economic integration, once initiated, would become self-sustaining, it was hoped. Monnet theorized that economic interdependence would drive integration until eventually, Europe would end up with de facto political centralization and unification.

Today, Europe may be at a tipping point where economic integration finally meets political unification.

“The European experiment with a trans-sovereign currency is facing its first acid test,” writes Euro Pacific Capital’s John Browne. “In essence, the euro was created as a lever to encourage a complete European political union rather than as a currency representing … an already unified economy.”

According to Browne, who is a former British member of Parliament and close associate of then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the euro has largely succeeded in creating the will for a federal Europe among the political classes even though European citizens have voted again and again to maintain their individual country’s sovereignty.

With Greece in economic crisis and unable to pay its debts without massive restructuring, which could throw the country into social turmoil, all eyes are on Europe. Can the euro survive if Greece leaves or is kicked out? If a bailout comes, who will fund it, and at what cost?

There are no good choices. All of them will be very costly.

But in some respects, as far as the European political class is concerned, it matters not whether Greece stays or goes. Greece is a peripheral country that is immaterial to the desire of a federalist Europe. What is material is that the current crisis be exploited to its maximum—and that means that it be used to foster further integration of core Europe.

Greek Premier George Papandreou is already accusing European leaders of throwing Greece to the bond wolves while they tussle for power. As Telegraph.co.uk wrote Sunday, “His country has become a ‘guinea pig.’ Rival EU factions are ‘playing doctor’ and pursuing their own agendas. Brussels was complicit from the start in Greece’s tragedy, he told his cabinet, and has since ‘created a psychology of looming collapse, that risked becoming self-fulfilling.’”

The move to force Europe’s political union is on.

Back when the euro was founded, the European Commission’s top economists warned that the currency, in its current form, might not survive a serious crisis. Because it lacked common EU treasury or debt union to back it up, it was vulnerable, they said.

“The euro fathers did not dispute this. But they saw emu [Economic and Monetary Union] as an instrument to force the pace of political union. They welcomed the idea of a ‘beneficial crisis,’” wrote the Telegraph in 2008. “As ex-Commission chief Romano Prodi remarked, it would allow Brussels to break taboos and accelerate the move to a full-fledged EU economic government.”

Now, in the midst of the Greek crisis, an increasing ensemble is crying for a federalized European economic government—one with not just a common currency, but one with a common debt union and power structure—kind of like a United States of America in Europe.

It is “Time for the Eurozone to Grow Up,” headlined the Wall Street Journal on February 8. There is a way out of this dilemma, it wrote. “It would require a European federal government with substantial taxing and spending power, with the ability to redistribute resources and impose fiscal discipline across the continent. In short, it would require a far greater degree of political union …. Yet the choice is now clear and inescapable.”

That is exactly the kind of talk that political elites are looking for. It is also a sentiment echoed in Europe.

“The crisis has revealed our weaknesses,” says European Union President Herman Van Rompuy. “Recent developments in the euro area highlight the urgent need to strengthen our economic governance.”

Europe needs a powerful “economic government,” he said.

The EU’s foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton, agrees. More political union is needed, she said on February 6. “We must mobilize all our levers of influence—political, economic, plus civil and military crisis management tools—in support of a single political strategy.”

“The days when a common EU foreign policy was regarded as mere talk are numbered,” Ashton said at the Munich Security Conference.

Yes, the days when the free nations of Europe charted their own destiny are indeed numbered.

As Trumpet readers are well aware, the Bible indicates that a king will soon arise in Europe who will deceitfully gain power and force his authority on Europe. The machinations for this pan-European federalist hijacking are falling into place.

But for those who know history, a united Europe will not be good for America. The dream to unite Europe inevitably leads to war. That is just a lesson of history. It is also a lesson of prophecy. Only this time, Europe will be united prior to the outbreak of war. And when the next war comes, united Europe will be starting from a position of already holding sway over the entire continent.