God's wars
When messianic narratives converge, they are harder to stop than any weapon.
The White House, March 5, 2026. Donald Trump sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, surrounded by approximately twenty evangelical pastors and faith leaders. Their hands rest on his shoulders, on his arms. Eyes closed, lips moving in prayer. The footage was posted on X by Dan Scavino, the deputy chief of staff, later that day, with the words: "Happening Now in the Oval Office. God Bless the USA."
Three days earlier, March 2. Benjamin Netanyahu stands at the site of an Iranian missile strike in Beit Shemesh — a city near Jerusalem where nine Israelis have just been killed in a synagogue bomb shelter. He reaches for a verse from Deuteronomy, read in every synagogue that same week: “We read in this week’s Torah portion, ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.’ We remember — and we act.”
Amalek is not simply an ancient tribe. In the Hebrew Bible, they were the people who attacked the Israelites from behind as they fled Egypt — targeting the weakest, the most exhausted, those who had fallen at the back of the column. An attack without mercy, and without fear of God. The Torah’s response is absolute: remember them, and blot out their memory from under heaven. In Jewish tradition, Amalek has never been a fixed historical enemy. It is a name passed down through the generations — the label for whoever seeks to destroy the Jewish people in each new age. Do not forget.
Pentagon, March 10. Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense of the United States, concludes a press briefing. The day before, he had stood at Dover Air Force Base for a dignified transfer — the ceremony for the first American soldier killed in the Iran war, a flag-draped coffin carried off a military plane. Now he announces the most intense day of American strikes inside Iran. The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes. He closes with Psalm 144. "Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle." And amen.
One week. Three leaders. Prayers. Psalms. Past images of slavery, liberation, sacred battles. Welcome to God's Wars.
“Humans think in stories”
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
Behind every war, there are narratives. We are moved by stories, not abstractions. We fight for stories: who we are, where we come from, who wronged us, what we are owed. Putin tells Russians they are one people — the great Russians, the white Russians, and the small Russians, meaning the Ukrainians — temporarily divided, but destined to be reunited. Serbia built its national identity on a lost battle: Kosovo Polje, 1389, the sacrifice made against the Ottomans that became the founding wound of a nation. America defined itself as the country that carries the torch of freedom to every corner of the world that will receive it.
Most of these narratives are, in the end, political tools. They can be reframed, updated, quietly retired when they stop working. When a story exhausts itself, leaders find another.
But there is a category of narrative that is different. Older. Deeper. Narratives so engraved in memory and flesh that they do not serve the people who carry them — they command them. Narratives that are not picked up and put down, but inherited, absorbed, lived from the inside. When these narratives are activated, they become self-fulfilling prophecies. They set in motion what they describe. They make the future they predict.
What is converging right now — in the Middle East, across the Russian steppes, in the corridors of Washington and the seminaries of Qom — is not one messianic narrative, but several, simultaneously alive, each feeding the others without the actors necessarily knowing it. A convergence of end-times stories — eschatological narratives, as scholars call them — each thousands of years old, each insisting that this moment is the one the prophets foresaw.
I want to take you inside each of them. Not to endorse them or dismiss them, but because ignoring them means failing to understand the war we are in. And because messianism — the belief that history is moving toward a divinely ordained end, and that we are its chosen instruments — is more dangerous than any weapon in anyone’s arsenal. It removes the exit ramps. It transfigures the cost of violence into the price of salvation. It makes stopping feel like betrayal.
Listen to what the leaders are saying. Read what their counsellors write. Open the sacred books you may have at home, perhaps forgotten on a shelf. You will see why this war is more than just a war.
I. Amalek: the eternal enemy and the Jewish messianism.
“Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt — how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!“ — Deuteronomy 25:17–19, Revised Jewish Publication Society, 2023
On the morning of Saturday, February 28, 2026, this passage was read aloud in every Jewish synagogue in the world. It is called Shabbat Zachor — the Sabbath of Remembering — observed each year on the Saturday before Purim. The commandment is unambiguous: remember Amalek. Never forget. Blot them out.
That same morning, the first US and Israeli missiles were rising toward Tehran. This was not, in the eyes of many Israeli rabbinical leaders, a coincidence. It was a sign.
The Amalek narrative runs to the bone of the Hebrew Bible. Amalek is the archetypal enemy: the force that attacked the weakest Israelites from behind as they fled Egypt, violence without mercy and without fear of God. The commandment to remember — and to blot out — is unusual in both its ferocity and its openness. Amalek is not a fixed historical people. It is a category, re-identified by each generation.
Netanyahu has been explicit about who his is. In October 2023, as he launched the ground offensive into Gaza, he invoked the same Deuteronomy verse to his soldiers. As the war with Iran opened in late February 2026, he invoked it again.
But Amalek is only the trigger: a name to be repeatef against each threat, and to justify any reaction. The deeper eschatological framework — the one that explains why this war is seen not merely as necessary but as prophesied — is found in the Book of Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39. The vision of Gog and Magog.
Gog is a mysterious northern ruler who leads a great coalition of nations in a final assault on the land of Israel. God himself intervenes to destroy the invaders — with earthquake, fire, and sulphur raining from the sky. It is not a human victory. It is the moment history bends toward divine sovereignty. And the text names the coalition’s members explicitly: “Persia, Nubia, and Put are with them.”1 Persia. Modern-day Iran. Named by the prophet in the sixth century BCE.
For many religious Israelis and diaspora Jews today, the current war is not a military operation. It is Gog and Magog, unfolding in real time. The actors are correct. The geography is correct. Even the timing fits a framework laid out nearly three thousand years ago.
The interpretive tradition that makes this reading possible has deep roots. The Malbim — Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yehiel Michel Wisser, one of the most celebrated commentators of 19th-century Eastern Europe — read Ezekiel 38 and identified Gog and Magog as representing Christianity and Islam in a final religious war. He named Persia as the leader of the Muslim coalition. He specified the timing: after the Jewish people had returned and settled in the Land of Israel.2
Writing in the 1800s, before the State of Israel existed, before Zionism had become a political movement, the Malbim could not have known what 2026 would look like. And yet a reader today, opening his commentary on Ezekiel 38, may feel the text is speaking directly to this moment. That feeling — that ancient words were written for now — is precisely how interpretations become prophecies, and prophecies become scripts.
Some Israeli rabbis are reading him now. And they are not alone.
The same Ezekiel text is being read simultaneously far beyond Israel. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, American evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson went on television and mapped every name in Ezekiel 38 onto a modern state: Rosh as Russia, Gomer as Ukraine, Persia as Iran, Togarmah as Turkey. His conclusion: Putin was being “compelled by God” — not toward Ukraine as a final destination, but ultimately toward Israel, following the prophetic script. Ukraine was merely the first step. The real target, in Robertson’s reading, was always the land of the Bible.
At the time, it sounded like the kind of interpretation only a narrow fringe would entertain. Four years later, with two active war theaters — Ukraine and the Middle East — converging on the same actors Ezekiel named, that reading has acquired a frightening plausibility. Not because Robertson was right. But because enough people in positions of power believe he was.
II. The Anointed: American evangelical apocalypticism
“There’s almost a kind of spiritual eagerness for a war in the Middle East. They believe a war is going to set off a series of events that will result in Jesus returning.” — Diana Butler Bass, religion scholar, CNN, June 2025
They are white evangelical Christians: not a fringe, not a sect. They represent roughly a quarter of the American electorate. They voted for Donald Trump in overwhelming numbers. A significant portion of them understand America’s bombing of Iran not primarily as a geopolitical event, but as a spiritual one.
The theological infrastructure for this belief was built in the 19th century by John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish pastor who devised the concept of dispensationalism. Darby divided human history into distinct divine periods, or “dispensations”, each ending in judgement. He believed in the Rapture — a moment he called the Rapture, when true believers would be suddenly lifted to heaven, sparing them from the catastrophic final days on Earth. And at the centre of his entire system stood Israel: the land, the people, the prophecy. The establishment of a Jewish state in the Holy Land would mark the beginning of the end times — the necessary precondition for Christ’s return. When Israel was founded in 1948, millions of evangelicals heard a starting gun.
For dispensationalists, Israel’s security is not merely a political concern. It is a theological necessity. Supporting Israel is supporting God’s timeline.
This is why Mike Huckabee — evangelical pastor, former governor of Arkansas, appointed by Trump as US Ambassador to Israel — sent the President words that read less like diplomatic counsel than like prophetic investiture. After two assassination attempts Trump had survived, Huckabee wrote: “I believe you will hear from heaven...You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU!”3 Trump shared the message publicly on Truth Social. And Senator Ted Cruz, defending his Senate vote to support bombing Iran, cited Genesis 12:3 — “Those who bless Israel will be blessed, those who curse Israel will be cursed” — a passage depicting God addressing Abraham, now applied to a roll-call vote in Washington.
And then there is Pete Hegseth — the man you saw in the third opening scene of this essay.
The Secretary of Defense of the United States has the words Deus Vult — “God Wills It,” the battle cry of the First Crusade — tattooed on his body, alongside a Jerusalem Cross and the Arabic word for “infidel.”
His 2020 book was titled American Crusade. He closes Pentagon press briefings with war psalms. He is, in his own self-presentation, a crusader. And the crusade, as he frames it, is against Iran.
This language travels from the Pentagon to the battlefields. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation — a non-profit dedicated to protecting constitutional rights within the US military — has been flooded with complaints since the Iran war began. Among them: a non-commissioned officer, filing on behalf of himself and fifteen members of his unit stationed in the region, reported that their commander had opened a combat readiness briefing by telling troops not to fear what was happening in Iran. The operations were “all part of God’s divine plan,” the commander said, citing the Book of Revelation and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He told the unit that Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” The officer’s identity was withheld out of fear of Pentagon retribution.
The US military is a multi-faith, multi-racial force of 1.3 million people. But that does not prevent the Pentagon from hosting monthly Christian worship services.
On March 25, Hegseth hosted the first service since the war began, attended by civilian employees and uniformed military personnel. He opened by asking the room to place themselves mentally alongside the troops fighting in Iran at that very moment.
Then he read the pre-mission prayer used by the chaplain who accompanied the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro. “Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence...let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation...overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy...wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them. In the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ, king over all kings. Amen.” The service was livestreamed.
There is a mirror paradox here worth pausing on. Hegseth regularly accuses Iran of “prophetic Islamic delusions”. He told journalists that “crazy regimes like Iran, hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons”. He is not wrong that Iran’s leadership operates through a messianic lens. What he cannot see — or chooses not to — is that Iran looks back at him and sees exactly the same thing.
III. The awaited: Shia Persian messianism
“Even if only one day remains for the world, Allah will extend that day until He sends a man from my family whose name matches mine and whose father’s name matches my father’s name. He will fill the earth with justice and equity as it was filled with oppression and tyranny.” — Hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad
A Hadith is a recorded saying of the Prophet Muhammad, transmitted through chains of narrators and collected into canonical compilations. Together with the Quran, the Hadiths form the foundation of Islamic law and theology. This one, compiled centuries ago, introduces the figure at the centre of Shia eschatology: the Mahdi.
The Mahdi is the awaited one. In Islamic eschatology — and above all in the Shia tradition that governs Iran — he is the Hidden Imam, the twelfth descendant of the Prophet, who went into occultation in the ninth century CE and will return at the end of times to restore justice to a world consumed by oppression. His arrival is not the end of history. It is its correction.
But waiting for the Mahdi is not the same as waiting passively.
When Ayatollah Khomeini founded the Islamic Republic in 1979, he performed a theological revolution that Western analysis has chronically underestimated. Traditional Shia doctrine held that in the Mahdi’s absence, the clergy should remain outside politics — waiting, not governing. Khomeini reversed this entirely. A qualified clergy, he argued, must govern in the Mahdi’s name, preparing the conditions for his return. Active preparation instead of passive waiting.
This doctrine is even written into the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, when describing the Office of Supreme Leader
“During the occultation of the Wali al-’Asr (may God hasten his reappearance), the leadership of the Islamic world devolve upon the just and pious person, who is fully aware of the circumstances of his age, courageous, resourceful, and possessed of administrative ability.” — Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Article 5
The article establishes the legal and theological basis for the Supreme Leader’s authority during the absence of the 12th Imam, but it also suggests that this authority exists to prepare the ground for the Mahdi’s return. How, exactly, does governing in his name do that?
Here comes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: constitutionally defined as an ideological army. Since at least 2009, Mahdism has been a central lens for its doctrine and training. More than half of IRGC indoctrination is devoted to eschatological preparation. Promotion favours ideological conviction over technical expertise.
In September 2024, the Corps held a ceremonial assembly at the Jamkaran Mosque near Qom — the site where, in Shia tradition, the Mahdi is expected to emerge — to renew its allegiance to the Hidden Imam. The IRGC have a mission: to do everything it takes to accelerate the Mahdi’s coming.
And here the Iranian strand intersects with every other strand in this essay. The Mahdi’s coming is restorative — he comes to correct the world, not end it. But within the IRGC, a more active reading has taken hold: the idea that the conditions for the Mahdi’s return can be hastened through human action. Confronting the Great Satan — America — and the Little Satan — Israel — is framed as not only politically justified but eschatologically necessary.
The destruction of these forces is the ground being prepared.
IV. The Restrainer: from Saint Paul to Peter Thiel
“The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety...if the Antichrist were to come to power, it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time.” — Peter Thiel, October 2024
In the autumn of 2024, Peter Thiel — billionaire, PayPal co-founder, and arguably the most influential intellectual of the current American right — delivered a four-part lecture series in San Francisco titled, simply, “The Antichrist.” The events were off the record, but they leaked anyway. He later took the lectures to other cities.
Between March 8 and 19, 2026 — as American bombers were flying sorties over Iran — Thiel brought these lectures to Rome, delivering them from a palazzo near Piazza Navona, a short walk from the Vatican. But Rome is Rome: a city that has already seen everything, all the sacred obsessions, all the capital sins, and everything in between. What Thiel had to say did not resonate much. The audience on the first evening numbered around two hundred. By the second day, according to Italian press reports, it had thinned considerably. One observer described the content as “few ideas, but thoroughly confused.”
But the ideas matter, however confused — because ideas, even half-formed ones, inspire politics. And wars.
At the heart of Thiel’s framework is a concept from Saint Paul. In his second letter to the Thessalonians, written around 50 CE, Paul warned that before the final lawless figure (the “Antichrist”) could be revealed, something - or someone - was holding him back.
“And now you know what is restraining,” Paul wrote, “that he may be revealed in his own time... He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way.”
This is an ambiguous translation of an already ambiguous ancient Greek text, and it is hard to read. Paul uses the neuter form — τὸ κατέχον, to katechon, an impersonal force — in one verse, and the masculine — ὁ κατέχων, ho katechon, a personal agent — in the very next. The katechon is what, or who, restrains the apocalypse. That grammatical ambiguity, in two verses of a letter to a small community in northern Greece, has generated two thousand years of political theology.
The Katechon. Think of it as the bouncer at the door of the apocalypse. As long as the bouncer holds, chaos stays outside. Remove the bouncer, and everything restrained is released. The question each tradition in this essay is asking — whether they use Paul’s vocabulary or not — is always the same: Who is the bouncer? And who is trying to remove them?
For Thiel, the greatest danger is not someone who celebrates apocalypse. It is someone who offers peace. He draws on Vladimir Soloviev, a Russian Orthodox philosopher who in 1900 imagined the Antichrist not as a monster, but as a humanitarian superman — a figure offering universal prosperity, global unity, and the end of conflict, in exchange for total submission to him.
The Antichrist wins by denouncing apocalypse while quietly building the infrastructure of total control. For Thiel, that infrastructure is the global technocratic order. On a whiteboard photographed at the Rome lectures, he mapped it plainly: on one side, the Katechon, represented by the nation-states. Above all, of course, the United States of Donald Trump. On the other, the Antichrist: the UN, international NGOs, EU regulation, climate activism. And at the far end of the Antichrist column: China. The greatest threat of all. A long list of candidates for the Antichrist.
Here is what makes this framework so strange, and so revealing.
The same concept — the Katechon, the restrainer holding back the end — is being used simultaneously, and with equal conviction, in Moscow. In a declaration from the World Russian People’s Council in March 2024, Orthodox Patriarch Kirill called Russia’s war in Ukraine a “holy war” and declared Russia’s supreme mission to be that of “the universal Restraining One, protecting the world from evil.” The reference to 2 Thessalonians was unmistakable. Russia is the Katechon. Putin is its embodiment. The West, including America, is the force of lawlessness.
For Thiel, the Katechon is America and the nation-state. For Kirill, the Katechon is Russia and the Orthodox world. They are using the same ancient concept to describe themselves as the hero — and each other as the villain.
And then there is Alexander Dugin, the philosopher whose work has been required reading at Russian military officer academies for decades, and who has achieved something remarkable: he has crossed the civilisational divide between Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, and found the same logic on both sides. “Muslims understand me well,” he told Al Arabiya in 2023, “because I believe the West is the Dajjal” — the Islamic Antichrist — “that destroys religion, family, and morality.” For Dugin, Israel is a Western outpost, a tool of liberal hegemony. The conflict unfolding before us is not political. It is eschatological. “Before our eyes, prophecies are being fulfilled — and not by accident but because both sides are consciously acting on them.”
A neo-Catholic entrepreneur turned philosopher, a KGB-linked Patriarch, an anti-Western philosopher reading a cryptic text from early Christianity. Each claiming the role of the restrainer for their own camp. Each naming the other as the Antichrist. And caught in the middle, the object of their mutual contempt — the liberal, post-nationalist world order that Europe, for all its hesitations and contradictions, is still trying to embody.
V. The player without a messiah
At the time of writing, we do not know how this war ends.
We do not know whether the Iranian regime survives the strikes. Whether Hegseth’s bombers achieve what he calls regime change. Whether Netanyahu’s Amalek narrative brings Israel closer to security or to catastrophe. Whether Putin’s Katechon holds or breaks. Whether Thiel’s Antichrist is ruling Brussels or Beijing.
What we do know is this: every major actor in this conflict is operating inside a story that tells them the suffering is necessary, the violence is purposeful, and the end — their end, the right end — is guaranteed.
Every major actor, except one.
China has no Messiah.
No Katechon. No Mahdi.
No Gog and Magog waiting to be fulfilled.
Chinese civilisation operates on a different temporal logic entirely — cyclical rather than linear, restorative rather than terminal. Dynasties rise and fall. The Mandate of Heaven passes. There is no final battle, no chosen people’s triumph, no moment when history ends and the righteous are vindicated.
Confucius, asked about ultimate things, is said to have replied: I don’t know about such things.
The Chinese Communist Party’s wariness of messianic movements is not philosophical — it is historical memory written in blood. The Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and 1860s, led by a man who believed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ, killed approximately twenty million people. The CCP has not forgotten. It suppresses millenarian movements not from atheism alone, but from national trauma.
As the US and Israel struck Iran in late February 2026, China evacuated three thousand of its citizens from the region and called for a ceasefire. Then it did nothing else. It watched and calculated. According to analysts at the German Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), the leading European research centre on Chinese matters, Beijing’s response has been characterised by “cool economic and geopolitical pragmatism.” As American munitions deplete, China’s intelligence services update their assessment of US military capabilities in real time. As the Middle East fractures further, China’s Five-Year Plan continues.
Peter Thiel placed China at the far end of his Antichrist column in Rome — the “totalitarian AI” that must not be allowed to win. For Dugin, China is a civilizational pole still searching for its shape. For the evangelical dispensationalists, China does not appear on the map at all. Ezekiel did not mention it.
And that, perhaps, is precisely the point.
Every player in God’s Wars believes their suffering is the precondition for a glorious end. China is the only major power that believes there is no glorious end — only the next cycle. It sits outside these stories, watching the others exhaust themselves in pursuit of a finale that, in the Chinese framework, will never come. It is not waiting for a Messiah. It is updating its Five-Year Plan.
Is that the Katechon — the quiet force that holds the world together while the others tear it apart? Or the Antichrist — the patient, pragmatic power that will be left to collect the broken pieces and build the next order from the wreckage?
We do not know. But we should ask the question out loud.
What we have witnessed in the past weeks is not merely a military escalation in the Middle East. It is the convergence of messianic clocks that have been running, separately, for thousands of years — and that have now, for the first time, begun to tick in unison. The snowfall has begun. When it becomes an avalanche, the question of who holds the Katechon will matter enormously.
And the only player not listening to the messianic clock may be the one best positioned to decide what comes after.
Epilogue: a view from Rome.
It was not the first time Rome had spoken into a war and gone unheard. Pope Francis spent the final years of his life appealing for peace in Ukraine and in the Holy Land — writing, meeting, phoning heads of state, and weeping publicly.
On March 15, two weeks into the new war, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem — the senior Catholic figure living inside the conflict — spoke at a webinar about the war. He named directly what Hegseth and others were doing.
“The abuse and manipulation of God’s name to justify this and any other war is the gravest sin we can commit at this time,” he said. “There are no new crusades. If God is present in this war, He is among those who are dying, who are suffering, who are in pain.”
On Palm Sunday, March 29, 2026 — the day this essay is published — Pope Leo XIII stood in St. Peter’s Square and said what no head of state or military commander in this war has yet said. He invoked the Jesus who entered Jerusalem not on a war horse but on a donkey. Who stopped his disciple from drawing a sword. Who did not open his mouth when led to slaughter.
“Brothers and sisters,” the Pope said, “this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood” (Is 1:15).
Then, simply: “Christ, King of Peace, cries out again from his cross: God is love! Have mercy! Lay down your weapons! Remember that you are brothers and sisters!”
Ezekiel 38:5 — source text: sefaria.org/Ezekiel.38
Malbim Beur Hamilot on Ezekiel 38 — sefaria.org/Malbim_Beur_Hamilot_on_Ezekiel.38
June 17, 2025 — during the 12-day Israel-Iran war (the precursor conflict to the current one). Trump shared it himself on Truth Social, then the White House posted it officially on social media with the caption "From Mike Huckabee, a Pastor, Politician, Ambassador, and Great Person!"