Nations’ Insurance, Impudence, Imprudence Trap

The Iran war may illustrate this pattern!

 

Like individuals and companies, nations seek and establish various insurance mechanisms against potential losses and dangers. Thus, they organize militaries, building alliances, and devise elaborate governance strategies and tactics intended to guarantee their national security against external and internal attacks on their critical sectors. Such actions are common, and appear prudent to governments. Yet history repeatedly shows darker, flexible patterns, both within and between nations:

  • Nation’s insurance schemes may breed impudence that eventually produces imprudence.
  • Their Impudence may trigger insurance schemes that culminate in imprudent arrangements.

  • Their imprudence may provoke impudence (both internally and externally), that triggers demands for various types of insurance. ¹

The Biblical Pattern

In His declared ultimate command in and over His creation, The Lord’s cloaked hand ensures His interim and ultimate strategic plans will be fully achieved. Surely this includes relations among/across the nations of the world!

 

The current war in Iran offers a striking modern illustration of an iterative historical pattern in The Old Testament, when ancient Israel and Judah sought and negotiated allies to protect them in the event of an attack by powerful enemies. In each case, The Lord sternly rebuked Israel and Judah for relying on promises of mere human protection from other nations, rather than relying on Him as He had originally and persistently demanded Jacob’s descendants to do. ² They refused. 

 

Thus, He dispatched numerous prophets to convey His rebukes and warnings, with affirmations that such plans would utterly fail. His remedial efforts were to no avail. Eventually, He allowed all of His predictions to materialize. Allies of those two nations had leaned on utterly failed to offer the promised, paid-for protections. The Lord achieved His much higher objectives when He ‘figuratively pulled the rugs out from under them all. One-by-one, He judged them out of existence for their persistent, unrepentant sinfulness and PRIDE.

 

Moreover, across this current age, He has persistently applied variations of this same pattern, especially to all hegemon nations! And He promises to continue and EXPAND this with predicted, GLOBAL impacts when HE (a) opens the 6th seal on His scroll; and (b) initiates the GLOBAL APOCALYPSE!

 

The War in Iran

 

For decades, The U.S. has been the strategic insurer of Israel and the Gulf nations against attacks by Iran. Its large, annual military grants to Israel, and its numerous military bases in several Gulf nations serve as their defense shields-- their strategic insurance blanket against possible attacks by Iran and its proxy militias in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. (others?) For decades, this arrangement served to eliminate threats early, weaken adversaries, and secure long-term stability…until it didn’t. 

 

The U.S. president has a successful, even curious ability to persuade individuals and audiences to believe statements about his strategic objectives, even when he later substantially modifies or ignores them. He was reportedly persuaded to attack Iran first, in response to Israel’s stated plan to attack Iran, which might trigger Iran to retaliate against U.S. interests across the region. Thus, a new war erupted. ³ 

 

Iran’s response was not as anticipated. The strategic security insurance blanket failed to protect civilian and economic targets across the Gulf region, from Iran’s attacks. The war has widened significantly, and fears of even further escalation have spread across the region and world. I ponder whether Gulf nations might reconsider and/or renegotiate their U.S. security blanket insurance arrangement. 

 

Moreover, in light of another iterative, historical pattern across The Bible and modern history, I ponder how much longer the U.S. might endure as ‘the’ current global hegemon nation? In The Decline and Fall of Global Hegemons, I review:

 

  • Discernible patterns across human history,

  • Whether and how the U.S. might fit in these patterns, and

  • Whether there might be some key lessons to be derived for, and hopefully learned by the   U.S. and future hegemon nations.

 

Bottom Line

 

The Bible and history repeatedly remind us of the futility of nations’ prideful schemes, arrangements and boastings in their powers, alliances, financial/economic strengths. Such merely attracts The Lord’s angst and, may hasten His promised judgments upon such insolence that fails to recognize all powers derive from Him. They frequently discover these things often trigger unexpected premiums—unforeseen costs and dangers. When they begin to believe the futures they engineered are secured, The Lord eventually allows events to reveal the illusion.

For millennia, The Lord prompted Israel and Judah to trust only in, and to lean on HIM! He failed to achieve His objective THEN, and appears to have the same response from modern Israel NOW. In Zechariah 12:3, He promised:

 

To make Jerusalem a very heavy stone for all peoples;

all who would heave it away will surely be cut in pieces,

though all nations of the Earth are gathered against it.

 

While ancient Jerusalem had always been like ‘a heavy stone’ for nations in its region, since 1948, the whole world has gotten a full taste of what those ancient nations, and The Lord, Himself, endured in ancient times. And His promise hints of much more to come (e.g., in Armageddon).

 

My immediate concern is whether my nation may have fallen into a possible geopolitical ouroboros, when what folks counted on as insurance, may have triggered/will trigger impudence, and might culminate in subsequent imprudence, that feed on each other. ⁴

Across history, nations repeatedly discover that the very arrangements they constructed to insure their security can, through pride and overconfidence, become the catalysts of their instability, and eventual downfall.

 

When what nations intended to guarantee safety,

instead becomes catalysts for upheavals,

 and events quickly escape control,

 might Heaven intend…downfalls?

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¹ Relevant definitions:  

--Insurance: Protective arrangements created to reduce risk or loss. In geopolitics, this includes military alliances, deterrence systems, security guarantees, and defense commitments designed to shield a nation from external threats.

--Impudence: Arrogant disregard for limits or consequences; bold, insolent behavior driven by excessive confidence in one’s protection, power, or immunity from retaliation.

--Imprudence: Reckless or unwise actions resulting from poor judgment, often taken under the false assumption that protective arrangements will prevent serious consequences.

² CITE EXAMPLES of His most harsh rebukes

³ Possibly mis-persuaded? Might he have possibly been persuaded to strike Iran before the pending U.S. mid-term elections when many think he might be in a potentially weaker political position to do so? The adage, ‘What goes around…’, comes to mind. 

⁴ Ouroboros: anything that resembles or calls to mind a snake or dragon eating its own tail. See also: Out of My Way, USA! (Poem).