Recently I had the privilege of spending two weeks in Turkey, long a crossroads, both north-south and east-west, between the vast continents of Asia, Europe and Africa and their armies.

The sense of history one gains from a visit like this is staggering. We saw artifacts and remains from the great empires of history that march across the pages of the Bible—Egypt, Israel, Judah, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. Objects from the reigns of ancient monarchs like Hezekiah, Sennacherib, Shalmaneser, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great and Herod made the Bible leap to life.

Yet perhaps most staggering of all is how the great God of the Bible foretold the rise and fall of these mighty empires (see, for example, the remarkable prophecies of the empires of Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome found in Daniel 2, 7, 8 and 11).

And rise and fall they did. Some, like the Roman Empire, endured for a thousand years. Other lasted far less.

All had their day in the sun as superpowers before which others trembled. But today their crumbling ruins stand in silence, mute witnesses to the fact that "the Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men" (Daniel 4:17, 32, New International Version).

With the relative stability the Western world has enjoyed over recent decades, it's hard to imagine that we could be on the verge of another earthshaking shift, a transition from one dominant empire to the next.

For the last two centuries two superpowers have ruled the globe. The first was Britain, measurably the greatest empire the world has ever seen. And though at its peak the sun never set on the British Empire, that empire eventually saw its sunset. The long struggle for survival in World War II left it exhausted, no longer strong enough to hold an empire together. Within a generation it was history.

Since then another superpower has dominated the globe. The United States emerged as the greatest single nation the world has ever seen, facing down even the mighty Soviet Union and its client states before its disintegration.

Are we now seeing the stress fractures that signal a major shift in world power, as happened with the British Empire? Could they spell the end to America's period of dominance?

Some truly bizarre alliances have emerged in recent years. Fundamentalist Muslim countries like Iran are teaming up with atheist communist nations like China and Stalinist North Korea to trade oil, nuclear know-how and deadly missile systems. Supposed U.S. allies like France and Germany subverted UN sanctions to supply arms to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And with Iran and North Korea rushing to produce nuclear arms, Russia and China block any meaningful UN action to prevent it.

What do all these have in common? They'd all like to see the United States taken down a notch or two, if not taken out altogether.

And as polls and elections have shown, the United States is deeply divided over its values, direction, place in the world and what to do about it.

Does Bible prophecy offer insights on these developments? We examine that question in the pages of this issue. GN