According to an increasing number of pundits, World War III has already begun with this or that global event, but so far none of the governments embroiled in it has formally made that admission. So, as I see it, we remain merely “on the brink,” and our focus should be on agents of chaos like Joe Biden who are trying to push us over the edge. The questions we should seek to answer are: “Who benefits?” “Why do they want it?” and “What factors and precedents can we study for clues to how this war will play out if it actually occurs?”
I’ve largely addressed the “who” and “why” in my prior two articles in this series, “The top elites want Trump to run their pending war” and “3 steps Trump should take to prevent WWIII.” I’ll take a pass on rehashing the domestic dreams and tactics of the American far left in this context, which are obvious and predictable. But I will add that I think the warmongers’ list of key foreign-policy objectives for this war is short and quickly achievable (perhaps just a single item) so the whole thing could be over in a matter of days or weeks, rather than months or years.
One reason it would be short-lived is the likelihood it would involve a limited use of nukes – because nukes are reportedly the only way to destroy Iran’s most advanced nuclear weapons facilities deep in the belly of mountains, like the Balrog in the Lord of the Rings.
Not to be flippant about world war, but if I were the war planner on this strike of likely several missiles in rapid sequence, I’d name the final penetration bomb “Gandalf” to put the whole matter in a relatable pop-culture context. For those who don’t speak LOTR, the wizard Gandalf-the-Grey killed the ancient Balrog demon in epic hand-to-hand combat in the deepest, fiery caverns beneath the roots of the Misty Mountains.
Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” especially as interpreted in film by Peter Jackson, is an unmistakable Christian allegory in fantasy form that takes plenty of literary license, but the Balrog concept is clearly drawn from the Old Testament association of demons with mountains – such as Baal Peor in Moab (Numbers 25:3; 31:16; Joshua 22:17) and Baal Zephon on today’s Turkish/Syria border.
Christian pastors don’t typically teach on demonology these days, let alone the present-day implications of ancient spiritual realities, but contemplating such things is a hobby of mine, and I’ve published two books on the topic (“Dynasty of Darkness” Vol. 1 and 2). In these studies I have come to believe that casting out demons was what Jesus meant when He said, “[I]f you say to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ it will be done” (Matthew 21:21). It’s at least plausible that He wasn’t talking about a pile of dirt and rock, but about the demons who dwell in mountains (and are worshiped on “high places”) just as He personally cast a legion of demons out of the mountain-dwelling Gerasene demoniac (up on today’s Golan Heights) into a herd of pigs that then plunged to their death into the Sea of Galilee (Mark 5:2-20).
Ancient Persia (Iran) shared the belief in mountain-based spiritual entities and reached its peak as a world power in those years. Interestingly, it turns out there is a variation on this same theme in Persian mythology (in which the demon is the one casting a righteous hero into the sea) depicted in artwork here.
In any case, I think the Balrog analogy nicely suits the topic of nuking Iran’s nukes, which I think is at or near the top of the short list of WWIII objectives – if not the sole must-do priority.
I don’t think anyone on the planet but Iran wants Iran to have nukes, and that includes Russia, despite their current military alliance-of-necessity. (I can’t see Orthodox Christian Russia’s current partnership with Communist China and Islamist Iran surviving long if other options – such as an anti-Marxist partnership with a re-Christianized MAGA-controlled U.S. – were available.)
The U.S., to preserve our exclusive precedent of using nukes in the extreme exigencies of war (which, sad to admit, was a huge factor in gaining global dominance in the first place) would likely pull the trigger on that action. Less likely but possibly it would be Israel. Either way much of the world would secretly celebrate the result, even as they publicly deplored the use of nukes to achieve it.
I’m going to mix metaphors now by looking to Nazi history for another analogy, using the Baal Zephor reference above as a convenient segue. The demon Baal Zephor was also called Hadad, the Canaanite God of Storms. This same demon was known as Woton in Nordic mythology/demonology: the source of the Nazi “Sturmabteiling” or Storm Trooper moniker. SA founder Ernst Roehm, and as many as 2,000 others, were murdered by Hitler in the weekend of political assassinations known as the Night of the Long Knives to bring the SA fully under Hitler’s control. The Night of the Long Knives has ever since served as a metaphor for packing all of ones unpleasant military/criminal/political tasks into a short high-speed, high-energy sequence of actions.
My alternate title for this column was “The Winter of the Long Knives” because I think that’s the closest precedent we’ve got in modern history for how WWIII would likely play out. If it takes that form, it would happen soon and be all done but for the treaty negotiations by Trump’s inauguration. This way Trump couldn’t be blamed for it, so if the other belligerents declined to participate in peace talks or treaty negotiations, his role as commander in chief during further hostilities would be untainted by the actions of his predecessors. If, in contrast, the other parties agreed to end hostilities, Trump would instantly become the great peacemaker who saved the world (but, in light of end time prophecy, hopefully comes up with something other than a seven-year peace plan). Frankly, he’d earn that title even if world war continued for a while, so long as he made peace his aim and eventually achieved it.
If Israel were to do the nuking, the “fallout” (pun intended) would be so much more serious that I think the chance of that is slim as a practical matter – but in regards to prophecy could set many last days events in motion.
All this is, of course, speculation based on current events as I perceive them from a wide range of news sources and commentators, tempered by a biblical worldview that assumes we’re on the cusp of a transition from the time of man to the literal thousand-year Millennial Kingdom of Christ. I don’t think its mere coincidence that all the world has its eyes fixed on Israel as it ponders news reports about wars and rumors of wars – for the first time chronicling the use of nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles (the U.S. testing one in the Pacific on election night – Russia actually using a conventionally armed one in a Ukraine strike).
But my speculations have a decent track record for accuracy, as evidenced by a story that just broke as I composed this final paragraph, re-titled by Citizen Free Press as “NATO boss kisses the Mar a Lago ring,” implicitly bolstering my theory of an elites’ backroom surrender to Trump on which I began this series.
