Eight years ago I started a thread at another site entitled "ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?"
Iran thumbs its nose at Western diplomats and continues nuclear enrichment. Hamas's chief, speaking from Damascus, boasts about kidnapping an Israeli soldier. Hezbollah launches a cross-border raid, prompting Israeli retaliation in Beirut and a return volley of rockets on northern Israel. Just another bleak week in the hopeless Middle East? Regrettably, no. This one was different. This was the week the Dark Side went on the offensive.
Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah: These are not marginal fringe groups. The first two are sovereign states, the third forms the elected government of the Palestinian Authority, and the fourth holds 25 of the 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament and, effectively, two ministerial portfolios. This was the week that the rogue regimes of the "Old Middle East"--as opposed to the shadowy, faceless terrorist groups of the "New Middle East"--reminded the world that they too have the potential to grab headlines and wreak havoc. . . .
. . . .That's a lot of tough talk about war, face-offs, and showdowns, even for the Middle East, but what makes this train of events more worrisome than a typical week in the region is that these events--and their perpetrators--are all connected. No, this is not another Middle East conspiracy theory; to paraphrase Henry Kissinger's line about paranoids, sometimes bad guys shooting at you from all directions just might be in cahoots. In fact, the quartet of Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah constitutes a better oiled, more cohesive unit than the diplomatic quartet of the United States, the U.N., the E.U., and Russia. Indeed, the rogue foursome is linked ideologically and operationally in a much more organic way than the charter members of the Axis of Evil ever were. . . .
The Rogues Strike Back | The Weekly Standard
That was in 2006 when it looked like the Middle East was going to completely blow up and the world was looking rather nervously at Russia, North Korea, China and other large powers who had a vested interest in taking sides.
So the names change a bit from year to year, but is now all that much different than then? Or during the post WWII decades as Russia dragged country after country into the U.S.S.R.? Or in 1948 when almost the entire Middle East was mobilizing to wipe the newly formed state of Israel off the map?
The Bible says there are always wars and rumors of wars. There is a lot of wisdom there.