Wars and rumors of wars, Christians understand this is a part of a human experience after the fall and is very much a part of the human experience right now. As a matter of fact, historians will say that there has been virtually no time in all of human history in which there has been no documented human conflict somewhere in the world. And of course, for many centuries, indeed for millennia, it was not known how large the world was, but now we do know even through parallel sources of historical investigation. We also know that peace is an achievement. And if anything, in a violent world, peace is an unnatural state that requires some kind of explanation. And that explanation is laden with all kinds of worldview considerations.

Right now, we need to look at conflict and figure out again what’s going on there, just update ourselves. And the two most important fronts as we think in those terms right now are the war between Russia and Ukraine on the one hand, and the war between the United States, or at least the military action conflict between the United States and Iran, and all sorts of assorted peoples on both sides, different groups. Interesting alignments. So let’s just update ourselves a bit.

First of all, just taking it in chronological priority, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine years ago was expected by Russia to lead to an almost immediate victory. As a matter of fact, we now know that Russian generals packed their dress uniforms expecting that they would be standing on a victory platform within just a matter of weeks. Now, that was just over four years ago. As a matter of fact, the big issue in terms of this conflict is the fact that the aggressor is Russia. And Russia in this case is showing the kind of imperialistic ambitions that Russia has shown going back to the time of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and others.

But it’s also just the idea of a greater Russia that has been very much a part of the Russian mind. And of course, is right now driving Vladimir Putin, who is autocratic, absolutely in control, and of course not about to stop this war precisely because it would probably lead to a political collapse in terms of his support. But the idea of this greater Russia is that Russia can only exist as Russia, fulfilling its national destiny if it has not only the massive land mass of what is properly called Mother Russia, but also has the hinterlands as they are sometimes called. And Ukraine is at the top of that list. Ukraine has demonstrated two things and enormously so.

First of all, courage, and then secondly, creativity, innovation. As a matter of fact, right now, Ukraine, if the war were simply to be over right now, Ukraine’s victorious, it has its territorial integrity back. History will record that this was the conflict in which the use of drones, and automated weaponry, reached a level never before imagined. And as a matter of fact, so much so that it has become a matter of the greatest controversy in Ukraine right now, precisely because President Zelenskyy removed a defense minister, the head of the defense, who was very much the advocate for using autonomous weapons and not using human beings.

Now, The New York Times on Monday, just yesterday, ran a very important report in which they made clear that robot warfare, that’s exactly what’s in the headline, has been extraordinarily successful. It also raises a host of military issues. And it raises issues that quite frankly are going to have to be thought through very fast. And not only in Ukraine or for that matter in Ukraine and Russia, but also in the United States of America. And you could say not only in the presidential offices there in Kyiv, but in the Oval Office and in the Pentagon as well.

Okay, listen to this and I quote, here is the former defense minister, very much the advocate of this kind of autonomous weaponry. And he said, “I’m absolutely convinced that robots and drones should be doing the fighting whenever possible. That is how we preserve the lives of our soldiers.” As The New York Times said, “In his view, only armies equipped with cheap, smart, and mass-produced weapons will survive in the new era of warfare.” He was the defense minister for six months. He was removed, at least ostensibly. The public argument was because he was pretty inflexible in terms of this doctrine. It led to conflict with military leaders in the uniformed services. It was also at least accused by some that he was potentially rising as an alternative, a rival to President Zelenskyy himself. I’ll drop the political references inside Ukraine, simply say the Ukrainians will have to explain that. 

But when it comes to a conflict between new and old in weaponry, that itself is a very old story. And the forces that develop these kinds of new technologies, they often pay a high price for it. But in Ukraine, it’s a matter of national desperation. And you not only have Ukrainian honor on the line and Ukrainians fighting for the integrity and the freedom of their homeland, you also have a great deal of innovation. Regardless of the direction the new defense minister takes, the use of this kind of autonomous weaponry, now even called robot warfare in terms of The New York Times, that’s very much a part of the future.

So much so the American officials are looking at autonomous planes as at least a central focus of where, say, the Air Force will go in the future, simply because it is a very different thing to send a human being in a plane, at risk to a place, or to send a plane, an autonomous weapon. It is also true that the use of autonomous weapons from the Christian ethical viewpoint raises a host of issues. And so one of the most important things we need to say is that all the rules, all the moral rules of warfare apply to autonomous weapons, to automatic digital weapons, to drones as much as to say a fighter plane. And so that’s going to be something we’re going to have to contend for and think through as these issues unfold.

The second arena of military action we need to consider is of course the American conflict with Iran. And here we’re facing a very, very difficult situation and it raises a host of issues for the United States. And I’m going to go into territory of deep water right away. And that deep water is this. One of the predicaments of the United States of America as the world’s leading superpower, culturally, economically, militarily, at least for now, one of the predicaments for the United States is that ever since World War II, the United States has not gone all in on any military conflict period. And the reason for that is political and economic and social and moral and complicated. But you look at the Korean conflict, you look at the Vietnam War, you just go down the list of American military actions and you look at long-term military tensions and incidents related to a country like Iran.

And you look at Iran and it’s a powerful nation. There’s no doubt about it, but it’s simply minuscule compared to the military capacity of the United States. So why are we in this extended conflict? Well, it is because Iran is a theocratic oligarchy. It is a totalitarian government. And the rulers there are not publicly accountable, not in any way. As a matter of fact, you have fractured leadership, it would appear right now, and it’s just a matter of which extreme faction gains the advantage over another.

But in the United States, political pressure is massive. Public opinion is massive. The American people have never given wholehearted support to the American government to go all in terms of military action since World War II. The United States wants a very strong defense. The people of the United States want a major, vital, strategic military. They want the most powerful military on planet earth. They get exceedingly concerned when any kind of military action begins to take any kind of time and when it’s not over quickly.

President Trump clearly got into this military action soon after the first of the year because he did believe it could be accomplished quickly. But that turns out not to be the case. It turned out not to be the case in Korea, not to be the case in Vietnam, not to be the case in Iraq, not to be the case in Afghanistan. It’s just not the case, especially when you’re looking at one of the terms that wasn’t necessary until the second half of the 20th century, and that is asymmetrical warfare. Symmetrical warfare is government versus government. It’s Germany versus the United States. That was a picture in World War I at the end and certainly of World War II. But it is when you have asymmetrical relationships. The United States of America, vast global superpower. Iran, much weaker, much smaller, much more limited, but Islamic theocracy.

And you look at it and you realize the asymmetry means that the government in Iran only has to survive. It only has to survive in the most literal sense to claim some kind of victory over the great Satan they call the United States of America. On the other hand, an American government has to survive with political legitimacy and political support. A president of the United States cannot really work without political support. And right now, by the way, that is leading to a dynamic that I don’t think President Trump expected at all. And it may be a major factor. In fact, it’s hard to believe right now it won’t be a major factor in the midterm elections coming in November.

The American people basically want it both ways. And politically, that’s almost always impossible. They want to accomplish American will, and that in the best sense possible. Let’s just say even with a very keen sense of justice, American will to put a limitation upon the terrorist ambitions of a nation like Iran. They do not want full deployment. They are not willing to see American blood and treasure invested in a major comprehensive way. And we have seen this so many times over and over again. You would think that it would be a lesson that no President of the United States would miss. So why did President Trump do this? The best explanation is he was convinced by authorities. And by the way, that may have meant some in the Pentagon, no doubt they were involved. However, there’s a lot of evidence that the Pentagon was pretty sober minded about this. It could very well be foreign leaders. Most importantly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. It was also just perhaps his own personal experience that led President Trump to think a massive military blow against Iran would lead to regime change and a real opportunity for something different in Iran. That hasn’t happened.

The big issue is what we do now. But the reality is it was not as if we were at peace with Iran before this began. This just raised the conflict to a new level. The question is how will we take it now to a level that will be acceptable to the United States of America, to our allies and to the cause of peace and stability around the world?

Now we’re going to turn to a different issue, but as I think we will see, it’s a related issue. And this is what happened around Morocco, particularly in the Spanish city of Ceuta. And it is there surrounded by Morocco. It is right there on the Mediterranean Ocean in North Africa. Of course, some huge historical questions that might come to mind there. How can that be a Spanish city? The point is that it is there in North Africa, but it is legally European territory. It’s a territory of Spain, which is a European country, an EU member and all the rest. And you had tens of thousands of men who ran over the border, and basically were looking for asylum there in Ceuta.

This led to huge political earthquakes in Spain, in Europe and beyond. President Trump made reference to this almost immediately. It is a symbol of government incompetence. It is a symbol of the kind of human trafficking that is going on in much of the world. It tells you a lot that most of the people who arrived there and ran across the border were young men. And it tells you a lot that the majority of them were Moroccan, at least we’re told. And it could be that this is a part of Moroccan Spanish politics. There’s some real conflict there. But in any event, it just draws as if in neon, attention to the immigration crisis, the migrant crisis that I think is threatening the future of Europe and is threatening the United States as well.

And I think quite frankly, it’s going to require a lot of very sober, honest thinking on both sides of the Atlantic to come to terms with the reality of this challenge. What happened in Ceuta certainly is graphic. Tens of thousands of young men just overrunning the border and going into Spanish territory. Now, as of Sunday, the Spanish were reporting that the vast majority of the Moroccan young men had left, but there were sub-Saharan refugees who ran over the border, many of whom they think are still there in Ceuta, and will be trying to get to Spain itself, to the mainland, to get to Europe and be able to claim asylum and all the rest. Europe set itself up for this.

Now, in part, when you need to say as Christians, of course we’re concerned with people in need. We want all people in direct need to have those needs met. And we believe that’s a part of Christian responsibilities, the part of the responsibility of a responsible nation. That’s a very different thing than incentivizing human trafficking, and the vast migration of peoples all over the world, largely with an economic incentive. And we certainly know that there are many people in desperate situations all over the world, but it is physically. It’s just physically impossible that the answer to that can be moving them all to one place. Even if it’s a place like Spain, relatively wealthy, of course, as you look at the total context of the world. Spanish authorities, especially in the current Spanish government, have been very pro-immigration in a way that has set it apart from other European countries. 

And quite honestly, what we have seen even in a country like Germany is that you had someone like former Chancellor Angela Merkel who was very pro-immigration and basically is now blamed for vast social and economic problems in Germany. So German nations, and by the way, pretty much now increasingly across the political spectrum. Now it’s not to say that people on the left are not pro-immigration. Many of them are for some very strange reasons, as a matter of fact, in some cases. But it is to say that the people of European nations are now newly, acutely attuned to the problem of immigration. And the impossibility, it was implausible for a while. Now it’s understood actually to be impossible just to have a melding of people from so many different cultures in a society. In Germany right now, and in France for all kinds of historical reasons, especially given French colonialism there in North Africa. France has seen this in a remarkable way, in a remarkably troubling way, in which you have many neighborhoods in which we’re told the Parisian police, for example, just don’t even go simply because of the danger and the opposition there.

It is really interesting to see how this has happened. And Spain is in the headlines. And as I said, this is a Spanish city. How can that be? Well, it is because of the Spanish conquest of that part of the world in the 16th century in 1580. And then however, in 1640, so you’re talking about 60 years later, the people there chose to remain as a part of Spain, than to become a part of anyone else. And so in other words, they saw their advantage to being a part of the Spanish Empire. And so it has been a part of the Spanish Empire as a part of Spain and its political sovereignty since 1580, affirmed in 1640. By the way, Spain has several of these autonomous provinces, and there are actually several kind of dotting like a necklace across North Africa. And here you see both the historical blessing, you might say, and the danger, the vulnerability of having that kind of territory.

It’s going to be very interesting to see where this goes. It is really interesting. The New York Times ran a documentation from the firm Frontex showing that the Northern Mediterranean area there identified as the Western Mediterranean, because especially where you see France and North Africa coming together, France and Spain, you’re talking about a massive amount in central Mediterranean and Western Mediterranean migration. A lot of the central migration is going also to Spain. You’re talking about something like 80,000 a year. It’s a massive number. And as a matter of fact, if anything, it is a larger number according to this data. And so we are talking about something that is going to require a lot of attention. By the way, Great Britain, 65,861 between January the 1st and December the 31st of 2025. So just even looking at, and they don’t say in the United Kingdom, but towards the United Kingdom. That tells you something of the scale of this issue. 

And of course, this is frontline news in the United States as well. And as I say, for Christians, the issue here is understanding the reality of our humanitarian responsibility, but that humanitarian responsibility doesn’t come as equal to, and the same thing as the political responsibility. And it is simply politically and economically impossible to just throw the borders open and let anyone come. And furthermore, you have now plenty of evidence that when you do that, in many cases, I’ll put this bluntly, the wrong people are coming. And I mean morally by that in terms of criminal gangs, human traffickers, and others. And it is simply a situation that is very difficult even to talk about honestly. And if we don’t learn to talk about it honestly, we’re not going to make any progress in this country or in Europe.

This seems to be the right time to talk about another big headline story with vast worldview significance just in recent days. This is something that happened last week in Germany. It was a terrorist attack upon the Berlin Pride event. So you’re thinking LGBTQ pride. This a big event, Berlin. By the way, ever since the 20th century, kind of a notoriously liberal city. So its pride event is a very, very big event. Here is exactly what we are told: “The police on Sunday evening shot and killed the man suspected of killing a woman and wounding 29 other people at a Berlin gay pride celebration. After he charged at officers with a weapon, German authority said the man, a 21-year-old German citizen whose family members migrated from Lebanon had been the subject of a protracted nationwide manhunt since the Saturday evening attack. The suspect used a rented van and what appeared to be a machete in the attack, which German officials called an act of Islamist terrorism.”

Okay. So that’s very revealing. But what we didn’t know then is what we do know now. Here’s a headline: “German Officials Knew of Driver’s Extremism in Months Before Attack.” Okay, here’s what we also know. This young man as a teenager was known to German authorities to have gone to join the Islamic State and had been brought back to Germany. And there was the attempt to reinsert him into German culture and into German society.

Here’s what a team of Times reporters tells us, “The signs of a committed jihadist were there. Violence propaganda attempts to travel abroad to join a terrorist group and finally deception. German officials had for months documented them all in Abdul Rahman Tariq Abdul Ballout, a Berlin-born German citizen of Lebanese descent. By age 21, he had a history of criminal convictions and terrorist aspirations so extensive that law enforcement officials were authorized to secretly surveil him. He met in recent weeks with deradicalization specialists who concluded he was too deeply committed to his extremist views to be helped.”

Okay, so the obvious question that comes to any sane person is why German authorities allowed this person, this young man, even after this analysis, by their own authorities, why they allowed him free rein and free movement in a city like Berlin. This is simply one of those questions that baffles us all. It simply defies moral imagination. You have the German government saying they had already concluded this young man was too deeply committed to his extremist views to be helped. He had already tried to join a terrorist organization. He was already known to be carrying and animated by these terrorist aspirations. The article then says, “None of it mattered. He was released from juvenile detention, which holds offenders up to 21 years old, two months ago after a failed attempt to join the Islamic State, the terrorist organization known for its extreme cruelty. Then came the attack on Saturday night.”

Here’s one of the big questions, when you think about Western civilization. Looking at the history of civilizations, every single one of them over a period of time has grown decadent and grown soft and lost, as one historian said, its own narrative. It forgets what it means to be a civilization, and it stops dealing with threats to its own civilizational future. And I think most people in Western civilization on both sides of the Atlantic would say, “Well, we’re not there. We’re very concerned.” Yes. But what does it say when you have one of the most effective governments in Western civilization? The German government, you have the German government going through its processes, already have this man in custody, this young man, already know the problem, already be surveilling him and all the rest, already come to the conclusion that he cannot be deradicalized, and still allow him free rein to carry out this kind of attack.

It’s just an amazing thing. It’s just an astounding thing. I’m going to say something in terms of Christian analysis, and I’ll stand by this. I think that one central part of this civilizational crisis is also the fact that if you are a civilization that focuses on what you may call LGBTQ pride, you have already lost your script. And I think it’s not an accident that these things go together. Of course, let’s be very clear. This was a terrorist act totally without moral justification. The moral question is why the German government allowed this to happen. But we do understand that as we’re looking at the civilizational trends, it does appear that the loss of the script, that’s the way some historians will put it, the loss of cultural identity. And I’ll be honest, as a Christian, I think a lot of this has to do with the displacement of Christianity.

In so many cases, the intentional displacement of Christianity. And that means also Christian morality and a Christian understanding of the family and marriage and sexuality at the very heart of the civilization. I think if you lose, let’s just use that historical term, you lose the script on that, you are going to lose the script on other things as well. Even, I guess, how to run decent, intelligent law enforcement.

It’s also interesting that the article in the Times goes into some detail saying, how did the German authorities come to this conclusion? Listen to this. Speaking of the young man, his name has also been pronounced Ball-yuh-weh. It says this, “‘He was on what experts describe as a well-worn path to radicalization. A decision or attempt to travel abroad to join a terrorist organization is among the surest signs of a committed jihadist,’ experts said.” At least a part of this is if you’re going to have experts, and they really are experts, and experts are going to say these things, why is it that they so often get explained after something awful happens rather than being taken into consideration before?

I think this is willful blindness. That’s a good theological term. This is willful blindness. It’s not that the reality wasn’t there for authorities to see. They saw it and just didn’t do anything about it. Now I know at least a part of this may be because of legal structures and all the rest. And that’s where, quite honestly, you can’t have the continuation of certain legal structures if you’re going to allow people free rein to try to destroy the very civilization in which those structures operate.

Okay, finally, I want to bring this home because I think a lot of people will be saying, “Well, that’s Berlin.” And of course the people in Berlin are saying, “Yes, you bet that’s Berlin.” But I want to come back to the United States because a lot of us would think, okay, that’s not going to happen here. But here’s something very, very interesting. And I hear virtually no one talking about this. I’ll credit the Times for running an article. Here’s the headline, “Justice Department is Seeking to Deport Mother of ISIS supporter.” This article ran the last day of July. Listen to this: “An obscure court set up 30 years ago to expel immigrants accused of terrorism from the country hurt its first case on Thursday.” So this is Thursday of last week. This was a court that was set up right after nine eleven. This is the first time it has been used. It is being used by the government, the Justice Department, asking a federal judge to deport an Afghan woman who prosecutors say supports the Islamic state. Listen to this: “The case against this woman is a test of a court where much of the evidence is presented in secret and defendants cannot challenge how it was collected.” 

Okay. This is because in the aftermath of 9/11, in the United States, there was a sobriety, there was an understanding, a seriousness about what we were up against.  And so Congress came together along with the administration of President George W. Bush, but this was a continuation of what had begun under even some democratic presidents and continued under democratic administrations. There was the collection of this kind of data through military and intelligence services and surveillance in such a way that this was outside normal law enforcement. This woman’s complicity in terms of supporting even her son’s joining terrorist organizations, it was gathered in such a way that the United States government can’t go into a normal courtroom and say, “This is how it was gathered without compromising national security.” That’s why this court was put together in the first place. It tells us something. It’s the first time it has been used. The article ends by talking about what’s going to be required for this court to actually work through this first case because by definition, there’s no precedent for this court’s operation.

The article ends, “The government submitted a supplementary briefing last week to bolster its case that this woman was what it described as an alien terrorist whose removal from the country through normal immigration procedures would pose a risk to the United States national security.” That was written by the judge. “The judge ultimately found there was probable cause to proceed with the case and will soon set out a schedule for further filings and hearings.”

So don’t think this is just on the other side of the Atlantic. These issues are right here as well. Obviously there are big moral and political tests here. There are big legal tests here, but we are facing a moment in which this country is going to have to ask the question, are we serious when it comes to not allowing this kind of terrorist threat in our own country? What did happen in Berlin last week should be a very sober reminder. As Christians understand, there are worldview issues exploding around us just about everywhere.