According to a Pentagon report released this week, there is evidence to suggest that outside forces may have helped trigger the global financial crisis in September 2008. The new battlefield is the economy, says Kevin Freeman, the financial analyst who prepared “Economic Warfare: Risks and Response.” Freeman believes the United States is being attacked. It’s an economic assault, he says, that is happening in three phases.

The first phase began in 2007 and continued through the following year, when speculators drove oil prices through the roof. This coincided with the collapse of America’s housing market.

The second phase was a series of “bear raids” aimed at financial heavyweights like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. Besides bankrupting long-standing firms, the report noted, these raids crashed the stock market, froze credit markets and nearly collapsed the global economy.

When asked by the Washington Times to identify those responsible for the attacks, Freeman suggests the Chinese and radical jihadists. They were in the best position to unleash such an attack, he says.

While the full extent of their involvement is not entirely clear, one thing is certain—the United States barely averted a catastrophic financial meltdown. The Federal Reserve managed to stabilize the markets somewhat by pumping $12.8 trillion of stimulus money into the financial pipeline. This, of course, saddled the U.S. Treasury with a massive amount of debt, which set the stage perfectly for what Freeman believes will be phase three of the attack—a coordinated effort to dump treasury bonds, which would collapse the dollar and kill its reserve currency status.

If that scenario rings any bells for Trumpet readers, it’s because we have been predicting it for going on two decades. Even before the Trumpet came along, Herbert W. Armstrong warned that America’s downfall would be brought on by economic war. Speaking of the U.S. and Britain in March 1968, Mr. Armstrong wrote, “[O]ur national economics will falter, and then collapse.”

In May 1983, with Britain having lost its empire, Mr. Armstrong wrote that the United States would soon follow it on that downward path. “Economic ills are starting greatly to reduce our standard of living,” he wrote.

During the 1990s, when America’s insatiable appetite for consumption was the economic engine driving the global financial system, the late Tim Thompson wrote this in the November 1998Trumpet print edition:

Foreign capital flight is on the horizon for America, yet Americans, in all their haughtiness, refuse to see it coming. America is going to be blind-sided and totally shocked when she is rejected by the investors of the world. In fact, foreign capital flight is one of the primary mechanisms whereby America will be abandoned by her former “lovers.”

After 9/11, in an article titled “Economic Terrorism,” Mr. Thompson said it was only a matter of time before foreign central banks took their money elsewhere. “Foreign capital flight, or the fleeing of hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars of investor money out of America, is on the horizon, because the U.S. will no longer be a safe place to put money,” he wrote in November 2001.

Today, Russia, China, Iran and several Arab states openly declare their intent to abandon the dollar. Chinese officials are already using their massive U.S. dollar holdings as a political weapon—even threatening to liquidate China’s stockpile. The Chinese state media describes this course of action as Beijing’s “nuclear option.”

At the outset of the economic meltdown in 2008, the New York Times acknowledged this uncomfortable reality about the American economy: “The level and stability of American interest rates and of the dollar are now dependent on the willingness of foreign central banks and other overseas investors to continue lending to the United States” (Sept. 9, 2008).

Think on that. The dollar’s survival is dependent on foreign central banks. The borrower is indeed servant to the lender, as it says in Proverbs 22:7.

Just this week, the Wall Street Journal featured an article titled “Why the Dollar’s Reign Is Near an End.” Time magazine asks, “Are America’s Best Days Behind Us?” These kinds of headlines are now posted daily, it seems.

Last year, distinguished historian and author Niall Ferguson told a group of business leaders and academics that America only had two years to turn it around. “Fiscally and other ways,” he said, the United States is “very near the edge of chaos.”

In December, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn warned President Barack Obama’s debt commission that if we judge by history, we are not going to make it! He said democratic republics generally last about 200 years before they “rot from within” and are conquered militarily.

“And we’re rotting,” Coburn said. “We’re rotting as we sit here and speak today.”

How eerily similar that is to what Mr. Thompson wrote back in 1997, when he compared America’s debt-ridden society to the whitewashed tomb mentioned in Matthew 23: “It is beautiful on the outside—it has the appearance of wealth and wellbeing—but inside it is ‘full of dead men’s bones, and all uncleanness’—it is a financial nightmare built by hypocrites and filled with all rottenness!”

That financial rottenness and ill-health was fully exposed during America’s financial 9/11 in 2008. America’s enemies clearly see it and are, even now, coordinating efforts to collapse the dollar when it best suits their interests.

Over the past two years, the U.S. Department of Defense has been preparing for this eventuality. Ever since the global financial meltdown of 2008, military officials have been practicing war games to prepare for an economic collapse brought on by a coordinated effort to collapse the dollar. As National Public Radio reported in early 2009, “America’s intelligence community has said the global economic crisis is now the top threat to the nation’s security.”

According to the Pentagon study made public this week, “Ignoring the likelihood of this very real threat ensures a catastrophic event.” The implications are deadly serious!

Freeman wrote, “If the dollar were not the reserve currency, there would be a mass dumping of Treasury instruments by foreign holders. … Pushed to the limit, the U.S. dollar would follow the path of the German currency in Weimar Germany following defeat in World War i.”

Based on recent activity in the global economy, Freeman believes phase three of this economic war may already be under way.

Such an event, Freeman told the Washington Times, is the “end game” for those seeking to destroy America.