Even More Rumors of War

The DOW Industrial index is near record highs, construction is taking place all over America, people are spending money and oil prices are falling which means cheaper gasoline and happy days!!  What could possibly go wrong??

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous -- in a way we've seen before.

In the decade before World War I, the near-hundred-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon -- and were ignored.

We are entering a similarly dangerous interlude. Collapsing oil prices -- a good thing for most of the world -- will make troublemakers like oil-exporting Iran and Russia take even more risks.

Terrorist groups such as the Islamic State feel that conventional military power has no effect on their agendas. The West is seen as a tired culture of Black Friday shoppers and maxed-out credit card holders.

NATO is underfunded and without strong American leadership. It can only hope that Vladimir Putin does not invade a NATO country like Estonia, rather than prepare for the likelihood that he will, and soon.

The United States has slashed its defense budget to historic lows. It sends the message abroad that friendship with America brings few rewards while hostility toward the U.S. has even fewer consequences.

The bedrock American relationships with staunch allies such as Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan and Israel are fading. Instead, we court new belligerents that don't like the United States, such as Turkey and Iran.

No one has any idea of how to convince a rising China that its turn toward military aggression will only end in disaster, in much the same fashion that a confident westernizing Imperial Japan overreached in World War II. Lecturing loudly and self-righteously while carrying a tiny stick did not work with Japanese warlords of the1930s. It won't work with the communist Chinese either.

Radical Islam is spreading in the same sort of way that postwar communism once swamped postcolonial Asia, Africa and Latin America. But this time there are only weak responses from the democratic, free-market West. Westerners despair over which is worse -- theocratic Iran, the Islamic State or Bashar al-Assad's Syria -- and seem paralyzed over where exactly the violence will spread next and when it will reach them.

What is scary in these unstable times is that a powerful United States either thinks that it is weak or believes that its past oversight of the postwar order was either wrong or too costly -- or that after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, America is no longer a force for positive change.

A large war is looming, one that will be far more costly than the preventative vigilance that might have stopped it.

Here;  http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2014/12/03/war-clouds-n1926942?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=

Jesus clearly said that they very last days will be marked by wars and rumors of war.  If you pulled out your globe and started counting all the countries of the world that have military unrest and then started counting the nations that have rumors of military unrest....you would have a pretty big list.

Now just imagine for a second if Russia starts to feel threatened by collapsing oil prices and sanctions placed on them by The West....and China continues to threaten Japan and South Korea over territorial claims....the author above says "A large war is looming..."  What might that look like if all of our modern weapons of war are put into play?

Matthew 24
6 You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.
22 “If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.