Russia, Turkey and Iran Show Up Together in Another Headline

Ezekiel 38 clearly tells of a time in the very last days when a military coalition will rise up with an intent of destroying Israel.

The coalition is led by Russia and joined by Iran and Turkey.

Now for the first time in human history this unholy union seems to be coming together.

We find this today in the Wall Street Journal mentioning the 'budding alliance of Russia, Iran and Turkey.

The New Dictators’ Club
An echo of the 1930s in the budding alliance of Russia, Iran, Turkey and China.

In the fall of 1940 the governments of Japan, Italy and Germany—bitter enemies in World War I—signed the Tripartite Pact, pledging mutual support to “establish and maintain a new order of things” in Europe and Asia. Within five years, 70 million people would be killed in the effort to build, and then destroy, that new order.

The Pact was the culminating act in a series of nonaggression, friendship and neutrality treaties signed by the dictatorships of the day, sometimes to deceive anxious democracies but more often to divvy up the anticipated spoils of conquest. So it’s worth noting our new era of cooperation between dictatorships—and to think about where it could lead.

The era began in July 2015, when Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani paid a visit to Moscow to propose a plan to save Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria from collapse. Iran and Russia are not natural allies, even if they have a common client in Damascus. Iranians have bitter memories of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Kremlin has never been fond of Islamists, even of the Shiite variety.


But what tipped the scales in favor of a joint operation was a shared desire to humiliate the U.S. and kick it out of the Middle East. “America’s long-term scheme for the region is detrimental to all nations and countries, particularly Iran and Russia, and it should be thwarted through vigilance and closer interaction,” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei told Vladimir Putin during the Russian’s visit to Tehran last November.

Since then, Tehran has agreed to purchase $8 billion in top-shelf Russian weapons and is seeking Moscow’s help to build another 10 nuclear reactors—useful reminders of how the mullahs are spending their sanctions-relief windfall. The two countries have also conducted joint naval exercises in the Caspian Sea. Just last week Russia used Iranian air bases (a little too publicly for Tehran’s taste) to conduct bombing raids on Syria.


All this is happening as the nuclear deal was supposed to be nudging Iran in a more pro-American direction. It’s also happening as Moscow and Ankara are moving toward rapprochement and even a possible alliance, less than a year after the Turks shot down a Russian jet. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim allowed last week that Mr. Assad will remain in power for the foreseeable future, and Russian media outlets are touting the possibility that Russian jets might use the air base at Incirlik to bomb targets in Syria. That all but presumes U.S. withdrawal.

Would Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan forfeit a U.S. alliance for the sake of a condominium with Russia, his country’s historic enemy? The real marvel is that it hasn’t happened already. Washington first proved useless to Ankara by failing to depose Mr. Assad. It’s again proving useless by failing to destroy Islamic State.

Barack Obama went out of his way to court Mr. Erdogan in his first term, but strongmen always have an instinctive contempt for feckless moralists. There’s a reason Turkish newspapers—all of them organs of the state—are whipping Turks into an anti-American frenzy with allegations that retired American generals were behind July’s failed coup. Mr. Erdogan is rapidly Iranianizing his regime on the Khomeini model. Turning the U.S. into a Great Satan is a necessary part of the process.

Then there’s China. On Monday, a Russian military spokesman announced that his country’s Pacific fleet would conduct joint operations with the Chinese navy in the South China Sea. This follows an apparently coordinated effort by the two navies in June to encroach Japanese territorial waters near the disputed Senkaku islands.

Mr. Putin’s relations with Beijing haven’t always been smooth—China is as adept at stealing Russian military technology as it is at hacking U.S. secrets, and the Russians don’t appreciate being treated as junior partners. But the drills in the South China Sea are another reminder that the Kremlin’s overriding foreign policy goal is to hobble and diminish the U.S. It’s a goal Beijing appears to share.

And why not? President Obama and his advisers continue to insist that the world has never been a better, safer, happier place than under their benign stewardship, meaning they no longer even register the continuous embarrassments of their foreign policy. The administration has become the Black Knight from “ Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” comically indifferent to his own dismemberment. Arms and legs all hacked off? “Tis but a scratch!”

Perhaps it’s in every strongman’s nature to seek and admire his political reflection wherever he finds it, whether it’s in a czar, an ayatollah, a sultan or a general secretary. Then again, what mainly unites the leaders of the new dictators’ club is the shared perception that they stand to lose very little in working against a country they detest and a president they contemn.

That’s a perception that is unlikely to change with the next U.S. administration. Readers searching for historical analogies with the present would be wrong to reach for the Tripartite Pact. But the ingredients from which that foul soup was made have now been laid on the table.

Here;  http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-dictators-club-1471908089

The world seems to be heading toward a massive nightmare of war, dictators, famine, civil unrest, civil war, Satanic chaos and the wrath of God....and yet most people in America are simply clueless as to what the Bible says WILL COME.

Even more sad is that most of the church-goers and pulpits in America also seem to be clueless and quiet as to the storm clouds gathering.

It's almost as if there is a famine in the land....not of food or water, but of the knowledge of what the Bible says is coming.

The prophet Amos warned long ago what would happen in the very last days;
“The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine through the land— not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.