The Dying Light of Day

The Dying Light of Day

 Pete Garcia

Do you feel it? Can you sense it? That subtle, almost imperceptible tension, like the faint ache in your knees that stubbornly warns of an approaching storm yet still unseen beyond the horizon. I’m not referring to the political or cultural strife that has sharply intensified over the past two decades. No, this is something deeper – something unknown that appears unrelentingly fated. This unseen tension moves silently beneath the surface of our time, like a powerful undertow, quietly pulling the unsuspecting into the murky depths of inevitability.

... there is an ominous and inevitable foreboding that accompanies this victory. Every nation, kingdom, and empire that has ever existed, save two, has come and gone. So, what is this unseen yet palpable tension I led off with? It’s the prophetic direction this nation has yet to move into but will. The reality is that this tension is the push and pull between humanity’s Psalm 2 desire of casting off their bonds, and God’s iron-clad prophetic plan.

As the undercurrent of tension in our age continues to grow, ongoing events (both good and bad) continue to feed the reality that the only certain thing we can all agree on is that the status quo of the last seventy years is about to become extinct. For pessimists, this tension amplifies their darkest anxieties, while for optimists, it heralds the possibility of meaningful and positive change. These are two states of mind on the opposite end of the spectrum. One thing is for certain, though: it will be increasingly impossible to remain neutral about all the goings-on in the world. Things are no longer “business as usual.” The era of the Pax Americana world order, which has defined the global landscape since 1945, is approaching its end one way or another.

This order, anchored in the financial strength of the U.S. dollar established as the global reserve currency under the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, is now being challenged on multiple fronts. The world is shifting – either toward commodity-based currencies or some variation of a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Moreover, many nations in the world are increasingly eager to move beyond America’s economic orbit because of how we weaponized our financial and economic platforms. To borrow a phrase from the US Marine Corps, it was believed of the USA that her friends had no better ally, and her foes, no worse enemy. But that paradigm increasingly varied in its extremes from administration to administration. The revolving shift has become so apparent in the last 20 years that the world writ large was getting whiplash from all the major policy swings between the political left and right.

“The people of the great nations of the past seem normally to have imagined that their pre-eminence would last forever. Rome appeared to its citizens to be destined to be for all time the mistress of the world. The Abbasid Khalifs of Baghdad declared that God had appointed them to rule mankind until the day of judgment. Seventy years ago, many people in Britain believed that the empire would endure forever. Although Hitler failed to achieve his objective, he declared that Germany would rule the world for a thousand years. That sentiments like these could be publicly expressed without evoking derision shows that, in all the ages, the regular rise and fall of great nations has passed unperceived. The simplest statistics prove the steady rotation of one nation after another at regular intervals.” – Sir John Glubb, the Fate of Empires

Most sober-minded historians acknowledge one immutable fact of history: every nation, empire, and kingdom, no matter how great or small, rises and falls. The lingering question on everyone’s mind now wasn’t if America’s end would come, but when....

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