How a Trump presidency may affect the world order. That is the topic we'll discuss today right here on the Christian Worldview Radio Program, where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. I'm David Wheaton, the host. We are able to reach believers and non-believers with that mission through the radio station, website, or podcast platform on which you are listening today because of the support of listeners like you. So thank you. You can connect with us by visiting our website, thechristianworldview.org, calling us toll free, 1-888-646-2233, or writing to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. You can also find us on Facebook or X. If you heard the program last week, you may have heard me, with only half my voice after losing it, say that we would be making an exciting announcement this week.
Well, actually, there are several. So let's get straight to it. As you likely know, the Ministry of the Christian Worldview produces a weekly radio program, hosts in-person events like the Christian Worldview Speaker Series and the Overcomer Course for Young Adults, and offers a wide array of books and video resources. Starting next month in December, in lieu of our annual print letter, we are launching a new monthly print publication called the Christian Worldview Journal.
So why a monthly print publication? Well, simply put, the journal provides a new way to pursue our mission to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and proclaim the good news of Christ in written form. Do you remember what Jesus' disciples asked Him just days before His crucifixion in Matthew 24? They said, what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age? That's a good and important question, and Jesus gave a detailed answer that they must be discerning.
They must be watchful for certain events. They must endure persecution and, above all, be prepared and faithful in the lead-up to His return. And that is what Christians must be expectantly anticipating the return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to judge, to reward, and to reign.
If we're not doing that, we're too distracted by this temporal world. The fact is, Jesus is returning to save His own, to set things right in this world, and do what no king or nation has ever done—rule righteously for the glory of God. Living in light of Christ's return leads to a purposeful and blessed life, and that's what Jesus says later in Matthew 24. He says, who then is the faithful and sensible slave whom his master put in charge of his household to give them their food at the proper time? Blessed is that slave whom his master finds so doing when he comes.
Truly I say to you that he will put him in charge of all his possessions. Christians are slaves of Christ. We are to be faithful, discerning the times and anticipating the Master's return. And that is what the Christian Real View Journal will aim to do each month in exclusive articles on current events, issues of the faith, and prophecy as we ready ourselves for the return of Christ.
And the announcement only gets better. We are blessed to also announce that Soren Kern will be the managing editor of the Christian Real View Journal. You may recognize that name as one of our guests over the years on the program. He is a man that fits Christ's exhortation to be discerning and anticipating His return. Soren was educated at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Georgetown University where he majored in international relations. He served our country in the U.S. Air Force and then began a career of geopolitical and policy analysis for major organizations such as Middle East Forum and the Gatestone Institute.
But what sets Soren apart is that he analyzes world events with a sharp biblical worldview and understanding of prophecy. He's going to join us today in the program to discuss how a Trump presidency may affect the world order, which is the title of his column for the December issue of the Christian Real View Journal. The journal will include about two to three articles per month. I'm contributing one for the December issue on what Christians should take away from the election of Donald Trump.
There will also be many other elements to the journal including featured resources, upcoming events, and much more. Now everyone on our print mailing list, so those who received our annual print letter in the past, will receive the December, January, and February issues of the journal. If you're not currently on our mailing list, be sure to sign up right away so you don't miss an issue. Just go to thechristianrealview.org to sign up or call Rosie at 1-888-646-2233. Starting with the March issue, the journal will be sent to all Christian worldview partners who support this ministry at $10 per month or more. Now if you can't afford that and want to receive the journal, just call us and we will figure something out. All Christian worldview partners will not only receive the monthly journal, but also the popular desktop calendar with scripture and beautiful photos by our own Rich Ganzel Photography. And yes, Christian worldview partners of $25 or more will receive the journal, the desktop calendar, and four to six featured resources throughout the year, if they so choose.
Now there's more to announce. Soren and his wife are Spanish-speaking. They live in Europe and so in January, transcripts of the radio program will be available in Spanish along with new Christian worldview social media pages in Spanish.
So spread the word about that to someone you know who speaks Spanish. And last but not least, we are also launching the Christian worldview report in January. This will be a monthly video cast where Soren and I discuss current events, prophecy, and issues of the faith.
We'll tell you more about that in the coming weeks. But joining us now from across the Atlantic is the incoming managing editor of the Christian worldview journal and geopolitical analyst Soren Kern. Soren, we are so grateful to have you be incoming as the managing editor of the Christian worldview journal, and welcome to the program today. Just for listeners who may not have heard your many interviews over the years on this program, just tell us briefly how you became a follower of Christ and how becoming a believer has impacted your geopolitical analysis. I grew up in a Christian home. My father was a pastor. I was surrounded by the Bible and by Christianity since day one.
My father had three services every Sunday and we were required to attend all three. Two of those were in English and one of those were in the German language because one of my parents lived in the Midwest, a very large German community. So I thought I was okay with the Lord. And I went about my business. I joined the Air Force. I traveled all over the world. I got a very good education at American University. And 9-11 happened and I saw everything that was going on the way many of us did. I saw that on television. And it really occurred to me, you know, like that I wasn't really sure that I was saved.
As it happened, I was living in Madrid in Spain at the time. And right around that period, John MacArthur, His Grace to You program was on every day. And I started listening to that after 9-11. And I really did realize that I wasn't saved.
You know, that program, that radio ministry really had a major impact on my life. I ended up attending the Master's Seminary and I was able to get saved and get a good theological underpinning. So, you know, that really does affect how you analyze international affairs because the Bible gives us a lot of details about why we're in the situation that we're in, why we're here. I'm talking about humanity, where we're going, and the whole issue of sin.
God will judge sin at one point, you know. So when we see the current events taking place in our generation, you know, with the re-establishment state of Israel, with the technological revolution, with the increase really in sin and evil on a massive scale, especially since the end of World War II and, you know, the nuclear age, the ability to have nuclear weapons that can just wipe out civilization. You know, the Bible really does give you a good framework for understanding current events.
The Bible doesn't give us all the details, but it gives us more or less a blueprint about where we're going. And so when we start seeing a lot of things happening, particularly in our generation, we can start to connect the dots. People who do not believe in the Bible, who do not have a biblical worldview, struggle to make sense of everything that's going on in the world.
Many of them are left hopeless. Others see themselves as messianic figures, and their job is basically to bring peace to the world. The great thing about this radio program that you have is it does help Christians interpret and understand and evaluate, analyze current events from a biblical worldview, and I'm really excited to be part of this. Well, we are very excited and grateful for this opportunity as well, Soren, to have you come on board as a geopolitical analyst. What you've been doing for a lot of your career, and also to become the managing editor of this new publication we're going to be doing starting actually at the end of this year. The first issue is going to come out in December.
We'll tell you how you can get the Christian worldview journal throughout the program today. Soren, our topic that we're going to discuss today is how a Trump presidency may affect the world order. We don't know exactly. We're speculating some, so that's what we say may affect. We don't know what exactly will happen.
Only the Lord knows the future, and he's the one who determines the future. But what do you think, just going back to before Trump won the election on November 5th, what do you think was at stake for the United States in this presidential election as far as depending on who would have won? Was there a level of surprise that after all that's taken place against Trump, going back to the false accusations of scandal regarding the collusion with Russia and the law fair, the court cases brought against him and the constant media slander against him and misrepresentation of him, the assassination attempts, the problems with voting integrity in the last election?
What was the level of surprise for you that Trump actually won this? Daniel 2, verse 21 states that God removes kings and sets up kings. So ultimately, although Americans cast their votes on election day, God ultimately determines who will be leading the nation.
And so we don't exactly know why President Trump wasn't able to have two consecutive four-year terms, why the Lord allowed the Biden administration to interrupt these two terms. But now that Trump is back in, I think that is a very big, I would say, blessing for our nation. The United States has been seriously adrift over the last four years, even longer. I would say really since President Obama came into office, the United States has sort of lost in a way its identity of American exceptionalism. The Obama administration tried to make the United States sort of like unexceptional, normal, like any other nation state. And the United States simply is not is not unexceptional.
It is exceptional. Geopolitically speaking, it's the most powerful nation state, I believe probably in the history of the world and the entire geopolitical order since the end of World War II is sustained by American military power. I know there are a lot of debates about isolationism and the United States should not be the world policeman and all these sorts of things.
But the fact of the matter is that it's a very dangerous world out there. There are a lot of adversaries with nuclear weapons who would like nothing more than to remove the United States completely and run the world according to their own ideologies. And I'm talking particularly about this growing access between Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, which is really an authoritarian axis that is trying to erode America's liberal democratic order. I think that there have obviously been many wars over the last 80 years since the end of the Second World War. But there's not been a nuclear war. And the United States military might have succeeded with a certain degree in preventing that. How do you prevent that by military strength?
And so far, the United States, even today, thankfully, is stronger than most militaries combined. But during the Biden administration, particularly after the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan, there has been a real perception of weakness and disarray in the United States. It's this obsession with Marxism.
It's this obsession internally, the corruption in all of the major institutions of the United States. And it's giving our enemies, I'm talking about American enemies, pause. And they're saying like, well, maybe the United States is much weaker than it seems.
And maybe now is our moment. So I think that if Paul Harris would have won, this would have continued this trip towards Marxism. And I think that President Trump, one of his priorities really will be to make America strong, to make adversaries of the United States think twice before acting in dangerous ways. I think it's really very positive in terms of geopolitical standing. Trump will not be able to reverse the obvious internal decline of the United States, but he can certainly slow it down.
So I see these four years as really a sort of a reprieve of the direction in which the country has been going. You're listening to Soren Kern today here on The Christian Real View. He's a geopolitical analyst. He's also the incoming managing editor of The Christian Real View Journal. And our topic today is how a Trump presidency may affect the world order. That is the title of Soren's first column for the December issue of The Christian Real View Journal.
And you touch on many different things in that column, Soren, and we're not going to be able to get to all of them today, but we're just going to scratch the surface and touch on a few of the highlights. But you started in that column with the situation in the Middle East and specifically Israel. What have you been hearing is the reaction in Israel over Trump being elected president? And how do you think it will affect the war going on there between Israel and its enemies with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran? I think the Israelis are going to be very happy when the Biden administration is gone. The Biden administration in many ways was an extension of the Obama administration following the same policies of promoting Iran. Now the Obama people and the Biden people want to empower Iran to be the regional hegemon. It's actually an insane geopolitical strategy. It's just unbelievable that the United States has been promoting this for so long, essentially trying to empower our enemies and the enemies of our allies over our own allies. It makes absolutely no sense apart from a biblical perspective.
It's obviously diabolical. So I think the Israelis are overwhelmingly thankful that President Trump will be in power again. He is pro-Israel. I think he loves Israel, genuinely.
It's not just a geopolitical preference. I think he likes Jewish people. The Jewish state, I think he admires what Israel has been able to do since it was back, came back into the land in 1948.
It's an inspiration. And I think that he understands that Israel is under an existential attack from Iran and all of its proxies in Yemen and in Gaza and in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq. And so the Israelis have been doing a very good job at defeating or at least breaking down some of these Iranian proxies, but they've had a lot of resistance from the Biden administration. And so the Israelis have been restricted on how they can use the weapons that the United States is supplying.
They've been restricted as to targets. So the Israelis have tried to fight this war, sometimes with his hands tied behind its back. And I think that now President Trump is going to want some semblance of order, geopolitical stability in the Middle East. And he will take a hard line on Iran. He will allow Israel to do what it needs to do to defend itself. I imagine there will be some interest from the Trump administration to bring these wars to an end, not to capitulate, but to bring these wars to a victorious end for Israel.
And I suspect that this transition period between the Biden administration and the Trump administration, the Israelis will be trying to do whatever they possibly can to get as far as they can to destroy the Iranian capacities, to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas' capacities, and to sort of eliminate these proxies as a long-term threat to Israel. Soren Kern is our guest today here on The Christian Real View, talking about how a Trump presidency may affect the world order. That is the title of his upcoming column in the December issue of The Christian Real View Journal. We'll take a short break for some ministry announcements, but be sure to sign up soon for The Christian Real View Journal so you can receive the first issue in December.
It's free. Just go to thechristianrealview.org or call toll-free 1-888-646-2233. Much more coming up with Soren Kern and how a Trump presidency may affect the world order.
We'll go from the Middle East to Russia and Ukraine to China and more. I'm David Wheaton, and you are listening to The Christian Real View Radio Program. We didn't want our kids doing all these secular games like Elp on the Shelf. We really wanted to put Christ front and center at Christmas, and they actually engineered a wooden manger that's small enough to hide. And then I wrote a family devotional with 25 devotions for every day in December leading up to Christmas, including Christmas Day, that you can do in about seven minutes.
And the devotions are just loaded with the deity of Christ and the gospel. That was Pastor Grant Castleberry describing Manger in Danger, a new daily devotional and game for families with children age 4 to 12. Manger in Danger retails for $40 plus shipping. We are offering it for a donation of $30 or more to The Christian Real View. To order, go to thechristianrealview.org, call 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. David Wheaton here, host of The Christian Real View Radio Program. Listeners are often surprised to learn that we as a ministry pay to broadcast on the radio station, website, or app on which you are listening today. That expense is recouped through listeners like you making a donation or becoming a Christian Real View partner. Our aim is to have each broadcast outlet fully supported by the listeners of that outlet. If you would like to help us in our mission to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, go to thechristianrealview.org and click on donate.
You can also call toll-free 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. Specify how you listen as that helps us decide whether to continue on a given outlet, and be sure to select one of our resources as a thank you for your support. Our topic today is how a Trump presidency may affect the world order, and our guest is geopolitical analyst Soren Kern and the incoming managing editor of The Christian Real View Journal. Now I'm going to quote one paragraph from your column. In the journal here, Soren, you say Trump has also said that expanding the Abraham Accords will be quote an absolute priority unquote. The Accords, a landmark agreement negotiated during Trump's first term, normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. You go on to say Trump seems eager to negotiate a normalization treaty between Israel and Saudi Arabia, but Riyadh in Saudi Arabia has stated that this will not happen apart from the creation of a Palestinian state. So the big unanswered question remains, you write, will Trump, who styles himself as a pragmatist deal maker, coerce Israel into accepting a so-called two-state solution?
You go on to write more about it, but I'm just going to stop there for now. What do you anticipate, Soren, about Trump and the incoming U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, in this idea of the Abraham Accords pushing for a two-state solution, and why Israel shouldn't do that? Yeah, we don't really know what the Trump administration's policy is going to be regarding the Palestinian situation. It's very possible that the Saudi government is just posturing, and they're putting out propaganda telling them that they're demanding the creation of a Palestinian state as a way to protect the Saudi regime from criticism that they're not loyal to their Palestinian Arab cousins. I think one of my personal theories why Trump was not in the White House over the last four years, why the Lord allowed the Biden administration to enter the White House is because I think that Trump, when he negotiated the original Abraham Accords, his plan in a second term was to establish a Palestinian state.
That's just my personal opinion. I have no real insights into that. But I do believe that if that would have been the case where Trump really wanted to be the dealmaker, the person who really was the creator of Palestine, it seems to me that that's why the Lord took him out of the running for the last four years and did not allow him to do what he wanted to do. I think that the equation in the Middle East has changed a little bit since October 7.
I think the Israelis will be very reluctant to allow the creation of a Palestinian state, even if that means no normalization with Saudi Arabia. But we don't know. Trump is a dealmaker. He can put a lot of coercive pressure on Israel to bend Israel to his will, if he wants to. We don't know. Mike Huckabee is a pro-Israel.
He's obviously a Southern Baptist. So he has an understanding of the biblical nature of the re-establishment of the state of Israel. But ultimately, ambassadors are representatives of the president. They don't make policy themselves. You know, the Trump administration won't make the policy. So the ideal situation would be for Trump to expand the Abraham Accords without the creation of a Palestinian state.
It's just really too early to say at this point. Soren Kern again with us today here on The Christian Real View, talking about how a Trump presidency may affect the world order. Soren is a geopolitical analyst. He's also the incoming managing editor of The Christian Real View Journal.
We'll tell you how you can get that throughout today's program. He's written an article about the topic we're discussing today. There's a segment or a wing of professing Christianity that is charismatic, and that has a dominionist theology, where they believe that Christians need to take dominion in the world. And they see Israel—they're supportive of Israel very much. And it's almost like they would like to put policies forward that would usher in Israeli dominion in the nation of Israel. They seem to have quite a bit of influence on Trump. I'd say more so than even evangelicals.
You can correct me if I'm wrong in my perception here. But what do you think this wing of professing Christianity that is charismatic and has dominionist views, what could they do in their influence of Trump that he would do something wrong in the Middle East? Sure, I think this whole Christian dominionism thing is something that it sort of comes from Genesis 1.28, where God gives man dominion over the earth. And now they are taking this to a completely another level. And they're saying basically that the United States should be completely reconfigured according to the Bible and Christian morality. They're trying to essentially turn the United States into a Christian state. I mean, that's essentially their objective. They're post-millennium.
They believe basically that it's the church's role to make the world a better place. And once we have this Christian perfection, then Jesus will come back. So that's the post-mill.
I personally, I'm pre-mill. I believe that the Bible very clearly teaches that things on this earth are going to be deteriorating. And it's not going to get better until Jesus comes back and establishes the millennium.
So we believe that Jesus is coming before the millennium, not after the millennium. So that's a huge theological, eschatological difference. So I don't know exactly how much influence these people have on President Trump.
I don't know if Trump is going to have the same advisors that he had on his first term and his second term. But what I do know is that he surrounded himself with a lot of Christian Zionists. And I myself personally am a Christian Zionist. I believe the Bible very clearly gives a title deed to the land of Israel, to the Jews. It was a covenant that God made with Abraham in Genesis. And it's an everlasting covenant. It's not a covenant that has any bearing on Israel's obedience or disobedience.
It's a covenant that God made eternally. And so even though the Jews were dispersed from the land for 2000 years after the death of Jesus and after the destruction of the temple in 1870, they're back on the land, although they're back on that land in unbelief because God put them there and they have the title deed to the land. So I think that these Christian Zionists who are within Trump's circle all have this conviction. I know that Mike Huckabee, for example, is completely opposed to the creation of Palestinian state.
He doesn't even like to use the word West Bank because they're essentially a political term for Judea and Samaria, which is very clearly Israel. We don't know what's going to happen in the Trump administration. We don't know how many distractions they are going to be geopolitically in the Middle East and Russia and China and other actors. We don't know what's going to happen in the United States.
We don't know how much attention he's going to be able to focus on this area or how much distraction there will be. But I really don't think that the Christian dominionist wing is going to have that much success personally, but I do think the Christian Zionist wing certainly will. And that really gives me a lot of optimism and a lot of hope. Just to follow up on what you said there about the dominionists. They're typically post-millennial and they think the world's going to be Christianized and then Christ will return. And yet lots of post-millennialists are actually replacement theology. They believe that the church has replaced Israel.
So there's lots of different views of eschatology, even within the particular categories of eschatology. So we'll have to watch how that takes place. I was just thinking in my own mind that there are those out there who would be supportive of Trump and supportive of Israel and take dominion in Israel, take over the Temple Mount by force right away, and just what the ramifications of that would be if they really felt the wind was in their sails to do such a thing, what would take place in the world. But we'll have to just watch and see, as you mentioned, Soren, what kind of influence they have over Trump during his presidency.
But as you mentioned, Mike Huckabee, I think, has a much more biblical and measured view of the history and perhaps the future from a biblical standpoint for Israel. Just one more question on the Middle East for you, Soren, has to do with Iran. As you mentioned just a little earlier, Iran is the country that is so opposed to Israel. The U.S. has had a completely crazy, for lack of a better word, toward Iran, trying to prop them up and support them in some way with the idea that somehow it creates some sort of balance in the Middle East, a country that follows the destruction of Israel and America as well. What do you think the incoming Trump administration, along with Israel, will be able to do with Iran?
You mentioned, I won't quote it right now, but you mentioned in your column coming out in the Journal, the potential for regime change away from the mullahs. Since the revolution that took place in Iran, I think it was back in the 70s. What are your thoughts on what could happen with their approach to Iran? Sure, I think Iran is the number one problem in the Middle East. And the Biden administration has appeased Iran for the reasons that I stated earlier, that they seek to transform Iran into the regional hegemon, which means that it's the most powerful country in the region. And the thinking behind that, I think, is that this would reduce sort of the chances of war between the United States and Iran, or allow United States to reduce some of the tensions. Because if Iran and Israel are more or less equally powerful, that sort of creates like a balance of power situation in which one country checkmates the other country. It's all really good, I guess, in theory, but we have to remember that Iran is a radical Islamic state. It's within their constitution to bring the Iranian revolution to the entire world. And these people, I don't think running Iran would have a single problem launching a nuclear weapon against Israel, because they believe the Shia, the eschatology teaches that that's when their Messiah is coming back, the Mahdi, when there's total chaos in the Middle East, particularly in Jerusalem, I would think that if they had a nuclear capability, they would probably use it, at least theologically speaking. So I think that the Trump administration is going to take a very hard line on the Islamic regime.
It's going to re-oppose all the sanctions that were in place during President Trump's first term and that were removed during the Biden administration's term. I think that these sanctions are going to be so tough that it's going to create a lot of hardships within Iran. And the hope, of course, is that there would be an uprising that would allow the Iranian people to get rid of this Islamic regime and replace it with a democracy. The Bible teaches that Iran is a very important actor in this end times coalition of countries that comes against Israel. So I'm very skeptical that the Islamic regime is going to be removed from power. They're very entrenched.
They've been in there since 1979. They're ruthless in terms of stamping out dissent. We do hope that Iran could turn into a democracy and return to a more normal geopolitical actor at peace with its neighbors. But the Bible does seem to indicate that Iran is a very big problem country and it will be a problem for Israel right up until the return of Jesus. Yeah, as I'm hearing you answer all these questions regarding Israel in the Middle East, Soren, I'm back to the early question I asked you about how your geopolitical views are impacted by your biblical views. And you can see how they intertwine in your eschatology from scripture and what you believe about biblical prophecy are always crisscrossing and aligning in how you see these things with Iran. So we appreciate that and that's why we're excited to have you come on board here with the journal. You're also going to be doing a series in 2025 on biblical prophecy to help us better understand that because it is sort of a forgotten high priority to live in light of Christ's return and to be watching for Christ's return.
And so we're looking forward to those columns as well. In your column for the December issue, you also touched on the war with Russia and Ukraine. This is a huge conflict in Eastern Europe. And I'm going to quote from the Associated Press here, just a more recent news report, Russia said Ukraine has fired U.S.-made longer-range weapons inside its territory days after the U.S. said it would allow Kiev and Ukraine to use those systems to conduct deeper strikes, a long-sought request by Ukraine. It remained unclear if there are limits on Ukraine's use of these army tactical missile systems or ATACMS, that's the acronym for it, as there have been on other U.S. missile systems.
Ukraine fired six U.S.-made ATACMS missiles, attack missiles, at Russia's Bryansk region, Russia said Tuesday, in what would be Kiev's first use of the weapon inside Russia. Now, for some, conservatives, I guess specifically, have thought this is a real major escalation to be giving Ukraine long-range weapons to attack targets deep within Russia. For liberals, this war has been almost existential for the U.S., thinking that we need to defend Ukraine at all costs, whatever money it takes, whatever arms it costs, send them to be able to defend their land from Russia.
Now, Trump has promised to end this war within 24 hours, whether that's possible or not, I'm not sure. What are your thoughts in terms of how this war could end, be resolved, and you touch on this in your column, and should the U.S. actually be advancing Ukraine, that they become a NATO country? Because many would say that's one of the reasons that, or a big reason, why Russia went into Ukraine, because they didn't want a border state next to them that's a member of NATO.
The situation with Russia and Ukraine is very complicated, and everybody has an opinion one way or the other. If you open the map, and you have this huge chessboard of countries and conflicts, the main threat to the United States is China by any definition. And so Russia and Ukraine, this is an irritant that prevents the United States from focusing on the big issue, which is China. So Russia and China and Iran and some of these other countries have entered into an anti-American alliance. They're trying very hard to undo this Pax Americana that I talked about at the very outset of this program, the American world order that's been in place since the end of the Second World War. They want to make the world safer for authoritarian regimes.
So they're trying to fight tooth and nail. And this Russia conflict with Ukraine is part of this. The problem is really that you can't have Russia invading a European country geopolitically, because if Russians get away with this, then what's stopping them from going into Poland and going into other Eastern European countries and trying to recover the space that they had during the Cold War. So this thing with Ukraine and Russia really does need to be resolved.
We don't really know where President Trump stands on this issue. Some of the advisors that he has named are very pro-Ukrainian and pro-NATO and anti-Russia. So it's very possible that Trump will take a hard line on Russia, might talk to the Russians, President Putin and say, look, this is what we're going to do. And the Russians might not have a whole lot of options. It could be that President Trump dangles some very interesting concessions to the Russians.
Maybe he'll put pressure on the Ukrainians to make some territorial concessions that would appease Vladimir Putin. So I think this really ties into this whole thing about NATO, and that the Europeans are not doing enough to pay for their own defense. And President Trump during his first term, really turned up the heat on the Europeans, and they were very nervous, and they were very angry that they were being expected to pay for their own defense. And when President Biden came in, the pressure kind of came off the Europeans. And so we've been in 1000 days now of this war with Russia and Ukraine. And it's a stalemate. Hundreds of 1000s of people are dead in Central Europe.
I mean, it's just inconceivable what's happened. And most of the European countries are just standing by doing nothing. I doubt very much whether Trump would withdraw the United States from NATO. I mean, NATO is very much in the United States interest because it preserves the semblance of stability with our main trading partner, which is Europe. I can see that President Trump is going to put a lot of pressure on the Europeans to start taking more responsibility for their own defense.
And whether or not that entails Ukraine becoming a member of NATO or not, it's just impossible to tell at this point. Soren Kern with us today here on the Christian Real View talking about how a Trump presidency may affect the world order. That is the title of his upcoming column in the December issue of the Christian Real View Journal. We'll take a short break for some ministry announcements, but be sure to sign up soon for the Christian Real View Journal so you can receive the first issue in December.
It's free. Just go to thechristianrealview.org or call toll free 1-888-646-2233. Much more coming up with Soren Kern on how a Trump presidency may affect the world order. I'm David Wheaton and you are listening to the Christian Real View Radio Program.
popular Adam Raccoon set. Theo is a 15 episode video series addressing key doctrines of the faith that is a must see for children and adults. Satan and the world are bent on capturing the heart and mind of your child.
Instead, get sound resources that will train them up in the way they should go. Browse and order at thechristianrealview.org or give us a call for recommendations at 1-888-646-2233. That's 1-888-646-2233 or thechristianrealview.org. We didn't want our kids doing all these secular games like Elf on the Shelf. We really wanted to put Christ front and center at Christmas, and they actually engineered a wooden manger that's small enough to hide. And then I wrote a family devotional with 25 devotions for every day in December leading up to Christmas, including Christmas Day, that you can do in about seven minutes.
And the devotions are just loaded with the deity of Christ and the gospel. That was Pastor Grant Castleberry describing Manger in Danger, a new daily devotional and game for families with children age 4 to 12. Manger in Danger retails for $40 plus shipping. We are offering it for a donation of $30 or more to The Christian Real View.
To order, go to thechristianrealview.org, call 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota 55331. Our topic today is how a Trump presidency may affect the world order, and our guest is geopolitical analyst Soren Kern and the incoming managing editor of The Christian Real View Journal. Soren, I want to move, just for the sake of time, I want to move over to another thing you touched on in your column, which is China. You had mentioned that the biggest threat or opponent to the United States in the world. Right in your column, Trump has threatened to impose massive tariffs on Chinese imports and prevent China from dominating strategic parts of the global economy. It's not just military force that impacts world geopolitics, it's also financial elements as well. How do you think a Trump presidency will impact China's goals in the world? Maybe you could say what those are because they want to have dominance in the Far East, and they have trade routes going into Africa and everywhere.
They want to be the world's superpower, I believe, yet they are very dependent on our country for manufacturing that we do there and purchasing products there. So how do you think Trump is going to navigate this adversarial relationship with China? China, with the Biden administration, had a free ride for the last four years. There's a perception that the Biden administration was weak, particularly after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and China's really taken advantage of, I guess you could call it a vacuum, power vacuum.
Even if that vacuum is not real, it's perceived. The United States still has a very powerful military. It's just that it seems like the Biden administration is afraid to use it, or at least to use it for deterrence purposes. So I think that with President Trump, he's somewhat unpredictable. I think the Chinese are going to think twice before challenging the United States openly.
I think they'll be much more careful about their policies from here on out. I think the real issue is Taiwan. President Xi in China has made it one of his life's priorities to recover that island.
I shouldn't say recover it, but to bring it into mainland China fold. The problem with that really is that Taiwan, because of its geostrategic location, it's sort of a linchpin for all of the other alliances that the United States has when it comes from Japan and South Korea, all the way down to the Philippines, all the Singapore, all of these American pro-free trade countries. There's a geographical line of these alliances. Taiwan is sort of the linchpin of it that prevents China from becoming a global naval power. And if China were to conquer and occupy Taiwan, that would really be a huge defeat for the United States, because it would bring about the collapse of the entire alliance system that the United States has created in the Pacific. Because once the Japanese see that the United States is not reliable, and the South Koreans and the Filipinos, it starts to create a chain reaction where all of a sudden our allies are starting to doubt American reliability, and they're going to try to start hedging their bets against a Chinese threat. So Taiwan is really a huge issue for the future of American dominance. If you said it correctly, China seeks to replace the United States as the dominant world power. The United States, for all of its faults and defects, is still to a certain extent a defender of free speech and free trade and the free movement of peoples.
Let's just say, I know that it's not 100% correct anymore. There are a lot of defects within the American system. But China represents a completely different order. It's an authoritarian order. They have 1.4 billion people in China who have no political rights, who are not allowed to have any public opinions about the course of their government or their country. And so that is the sort of authoritarian model that China is seeking to pose on the rest of the world. It's one based on fear and on totalitarianism. You know, what's at stake with China versus Taiwan and the United States is just huge.
I mean, it would completely change our way of life forever. Soren Kern, again, is our guest. He is a geopolitical analyst. He's also the incoming managing editor of the Christian Rule of Your Journal.
We're talking about today the title, the column that he's writing for the December issue of how a Trump presidency may affect the world order. And Soren, we discuss these different issues and conflicts going on around the world as believers so that we don't have our heads in the sand, so that we are trying to understand and discern the times. And it's really not just so we understand, it's so that we can be ready, we can be looking forward to the Lord's return, we can be looking forward to the Lord's return, we can try to understand some of these things if they have connection to biblical prophecy. So what is the connection that believers should be trying to make as they hear you talk about all these different issues around the world and running that through the grid of a biblical worldview, which includes biblical prophecy for the future?
You're going to be doing a series on biblical prophecy for the journal in 2025. Why should we be trying to political events so much as Christians? Yeah, well, we have great privilege of being Americans, being in the West, particularly freedom of religion. That's something that has been fought over for centuries, particularly with the Reformation during the Middle Ages. Europe was completely under the control of the Catholic Church.
There was no freedom of religion of any type. And so we're living in a very, very blessed period where we have this freedom of religion, freedom of speech, great liberties. And you know, that's at stake. Because we know from the Bible that at some point during the tribulation period, that will all disappear. There will be no freedom of religion, no freedom of speech, no freedom of economic choices, it's going to be total totalitarian control. And you can see through the technologies and through the way in which the world is moving towards globalism, that we're getting closer and closer to that. We don't really know where we are in God's prophetic timeline. We don't know when the rapture will happen and when the tribulation will happen. I guess the greatest indicator that we have is the reestablishment of the state of Israel. So we know that, you know, 70 or 80 years ago, God really started to refocus his attention towards Israel and getting the Jews back in the land four corners of the year.
Of course, this Israel that we have right now is not exactly the Israel that will be the headquarters of Jesus millennial kingdom, because right now the Jews are in unbelief. But we see all these trends sort of moving in a direction. So I think it's very important that we're thankful for President Trump, but Christians should not be putting blind trust in him or anybody else, any other elected official. President Trump is not going to usher in a new golden age for America. The United States is so corrupt, internally, so economically mismanaged.
It's such a deep level of moral decay. Even within the church, there's just unbelievable moral corruption that, you know, President Trump can maybe slow things down a little bit. But once these four years are over, and they will go fast, who knows where things will just pick up during this period that President Trump is in office, and he's fighting the globalists, and he's fighting the Marxists, they're not going away. They're going to fight President Trump tooth and nail. We saw the Black Lives Matter and all the Marxist anarchy in American cities during President Trump's first term. And I would imagine that will be on steroids during the second term, because they're fighting for a completely diabolical world order, obviously under satanic influence.
And so what President Trump is doing is he's putting like a monkey wrench in their plans, and they're not going to just stand by and take it. You know, so I think that as Christians, we need to be realistic about where things are going. We're not post-millennialists. We don't believe that the church is going to basically make the world a perfect place so that Jesus can come and set up his kingdom or his throne.
It's actually exactly the opposite. And so as we move to the globalism thing, you know, it's moving in that direction economically, culturally, through technology. And the Bible does say that God is going to allow Satan or the Antichrist to set up a global government, but ultimately the real global government that we're looking for is when Jesus sets up his millennial kingdom in Jerusalem and does away with all of these evil ideologies and all these evildoers and even all of these satanic spiritual forces. Yeah, that's so well said, Soren, and we appreciate your concluding our conversation today with that great expectation that we are to live in light of Christ's return and be anticipating it greatly, eagerly looking forward to his return, as Scripture says. And that's why we're so excited about having you come on board the Christian Real View to not only offer geopolitical analysis of the events, but the way you're connecting it to sharpening our worldview when it comes to what the Bible says as to where things are going until Christ does return. So thank you, Soren, for coming on the program today. We're looking forward to your first article in the Christian Real View Journal on how a Trump presidency may affect the world order. As I mentioned, we didn't get to a lot of it today, but listeners will be able to sign up and subscribe to the journal and be able to read your column there and, of course, your series on prophecy in the coming year. So we're looking forward to that, Soren, and thank you again and all of God's best and grace to you. My pleasure.
Thank you. I hope you can see why we're excited about having Soren with his combination of a sharp Christian Real View and biblical prophecy be the managing editor of the new Christian Real View Journal. Again, if you're not on our print mailing list, be sure to sign up right away at thechristianrealview.org or just call us toll-free, 1-888-646-2233.
The December issue of the journal is going to be printed and mailed soon. The Bible says, Inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once, and after this comes judgment, so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin to those who eagerly await Him. That's from Hebrews chapter 9. True believers eagerly await the return of Christ. That is our confident hope that He will return to judge and save and reign. But if you are listening today and you don't eagerly await Him, please go to thechristianrealview.org and click on the page, What Must I Do to Be Saved?
or just give us a call at our toll-free number. We want to explain the gospel to you so you too can be reconciled to God. Thank you for joining us today on the Christian Real View. In just a moment, there will be information on how you can hear a replay of today's program, order transcripts and resources, and support this non-profit radio ministry.
Let's anchor ourselves in what scripture says, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and forever. So until next time, think biblically, live accordingly, and stand firm. The mission of the Christian Real View is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. We hope today's broadcast encouraged you toward that end. To hear a replay of today's program, order a transcript, or find out What Must I Do to Be Saved?, go to thechristianrealview.org or call toll-free 1-888-646-2233. The Christian Real View is a listener-supported non-profit radio ministry furnished by the Overcomer Foundation. To make a donation, become a Christian Real View partner, order resources, subscribe to our free newsletter, or contact us, visit thechristianrealview.org, call 1-888-646-2233, or write to Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. That's Box 401, Excelsior, Minnesota, 55331. Thanks for listening to the Christian Real View.
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