GEOPOLITICAL gurus are the rage as the world nervously ponders where Israel and the United States would go in their war against Iran amid shaky ceasefires; stalled Tehran-Washington talks; Iran and America’s continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz; and worsening energy, food and economic crises worldwide.
On May 1, US President Donald Trump and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz talked of resuming attacks. And Iran declared that America’s blockade of Iranian ports was “intolerable,” raising fears of renewed fighting.
This is despite Iran already needing 12 years to recover from war damage and Israel and America’s Arab allies woefully lacking anti-missile munitions, with air defense radars devastated.
Will conflict again escalate and economies further dislocate if Middle East petroleum facilities are utterly destroyed, plunging continents into starvation and depression from global fuel and fertilizer shortages?
Or will belligerents find ways toward peace, rebuffing warmongers in America, Israel and Iran and heeding peacemakers there; and Russia, China, Pakistan and Europe urging suspended hostilities and serious negotiations, as Vladimir Putin in Moscow reportedly said in his call to Trump last week?
Either way, God may well win. Maybe.
Bring down the war freaks
For sure, our Lord, like his Vicar, Pope Leo XIV, opposes hostilities, which imperil souls through wholesale deaths, often with no contrition and forgiveness. War also drives combatants to violate morality for survival and victory.
Hence, heaven wants peace on earth, not divisions devils relentlessly spawn, from war between nations to discord in families and communities and between us and God.
But what if Middle East conflicts worsen, bringing global economic disaster? Bombing petroleum infrastructure would slash fuel, fertilizer and petrochemicals output for years. It’s almost sure to unleash a global economic depression.
So would destroying power plants needed for oil and gas operations, as well as desalination facilities supplying nearly all the water in Arab states, driving away technicians and workers needed for petroleum to keep flowing.
Well, if war worsens, its global impact may finally show how destructive and devilish the purveyors and merchants of war are. They already hurt us with the Russia-Ukraine war trebling world petroleum and food prices as fuel, food and fertilizer exports from both countries plunged. All that could have been avoided if American and British leaders did not block the March 2022 deal for Russian forces to withdraw if Ukraine stayed out of the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Today, warmongers have again swept aside negotiations, with Israel launching attacks last June while American and Iranian representatives talked, and the US and Israel repeating them on Feb. 28 amid Washington-Tehran discussions. This time, the economic fallout is exponentially worse and worldwide with Iran and the US blockading the Strait of Hormuz and stopping far more petroleum and fertilizer shipments, plus helium, which is crucial to high-tech manufacturing.
Many more nations oppose the war on Iran, even America’s Western and Arab allies, and irate objectors — including countless Americans — blame US and Israeli leaders, especially Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, plus powerful Jewish and Christian Zionists like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
They prodded Trump to join the Feb. 28 bombing of Iran despite opposition from Vice President JD Vance and top security and military leaders. Now, some American congressional candidates say they will decline election contributions from the Jewish lobby.
Add to that rising antiwar sentiment was the globally broadcast exchange between Pope Leo and President Trump over the conflict. That has personified, in a stark media spectacle, the confrontation between God’s call for peace and the warring ways of the world’s once widely admired superpower.
Thus, Western hegemony in its American iteration has lost its luster in the once-adoring eyes of humanity — the third time after European colonialism ended in the 1950s and Russian communism in 1991.
Two idols unhorsed
Along with imperial supremacy, symbolized by the first of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation (Rev 6:1–8), also falling from seeming invincibility is military might, another idol of our time and all time, on which nations spend over $2.5 trillion a year and rising, with nuclear-arms outlays up in recent years after falling for decades.
After the Gulf wars of 1991 and 2003 and before the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts, the world marveled and bowed before Western military prowess. Nations sought to acquire advanced and increasingly expensive weaponry, especially American-made, most especially Israel and its Arab neighbors. The latter also hosted vast US bases with cutting-edge air, sea and missile assets — all deemed impervious to any enemy.
But they aren’t, as the wars on Ukraine and Iran terrifyingly demonstrate. Despite Western arms and aid that poured into Ukraine’s 600,000-strong army, the country faces defeat with 1.5 million Ukrainians — mostly soldiers — dead, many millions more displaced, and its cities and infrastructure in rubble.
And even after Israeli and American bombs and missiles killed Iran’s top generals and scientists last June and then-supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28, Tehran has destroyed US facilities, as well as US and allied air defenses, then depleted anti-missile munitions and rained projectiles and drones on Israel and Arab states hosting American forces.
And Iran took control of the Strait of Hormuz, strangling one-fifth of world petroleum trade and one-third of fertilizer shipments, with the US Navy, the most powerful armada on Earth, unable even to approach the Gulf just as it backed off Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen two months after Trump ordered them destroyed in March 2025.
Thus, like the white-mounted First Horseman symbolizing empire builders, the Second Horseman spreading armies and armaments purportedly to guarantee security is also being unhorsed. Clearly, military superiority prods adversaries to create more fearsome weapons and countermeasures, as Russia, China and Iran have done and are now showing as Western arms falter in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Will our world now end blind worship of conquerors and warriors? Or must we suffer far worse consequences of our idolatry before rejecting the endless arms race and following Christ’s path of peacemaking?
We must decide, and may God have mercy on us.
