The New York Times published the following:

Can Germany Be a Great Military Power Again?
January 24, 2023 …
On Sept. 12, Christine Lambrecht, Germany’s defense minister at the time, addressed the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin and declared that Germany must be willing to become a Führungsmacht, or “leading power,” within Europe. …
Few countries have been as fundamentally shaken by the Russian invasion as Germany. … Scholz vowed to meet the NATO defense-spending target “from now on,” …
That both Germany and Japan — two former World War II axis powers — are now remilitarizing illustrates the degree to which the world may be reverting to great-power rivalry, with unpredictable consequences. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/magazine/germany-military-army.html

Biblically, we know the consequences. What could be called the ‘Fourth Reich’ will form. A militarized Germany will lead the coming European Beast power and destroy the USA, UK, and Canada (cf. Isaiah 10:5-11; see also Germany in Biblical and Greco-Roman Catholic Prophecy).

The Germans want to be separate from the USA militarily. A reader sent me a link to the following which came out from German-Foreign-Policy.com:

Berlin and Paris strive for greater EU sovereignty vis-à-vis the USA and embark on massive rearmament – due also to Germany’s severe setbacks in its rivalry with Washington.
23 JAN 2023
PARIS/BERLIN (Own report) -Germany and France are seeking greater “European sovereignty” and aim to “strengthen the EU as a geopolitical actor,” according to a Franco-German declaration published yesterday in Paris on the occasion of the ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Élysée Treaty. …
This is also due to Germany’s severe setbacks in its rivalry with the Unites States, including its growing military dependence and the threat of its deindustrialization due to the exodus of production sites to the USA. According to the French publicist Emmanuel Todd, the current global power struggle – “the third world war has begun” – is also “about Germany.” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz anticipates the emergence of a “multipolar world,” in which Germany and the EU are to assume leading roles as strong military powers.
Setbacks in Transatlantic Rivalry
The development of the relationship between Germany and the United States is largely the reason behind yesterday’s calls for “European sovereignty.” …
Over the past few months, Scholz has been repeatedly trying to verbally focus on alternatives to the growing one-sided dependence on the USA. … At the beginning of the year, Scholz had declared in an internationally noted article published in the US periodical Foreign Affairs, that in the currently emerging “multipolar world,” “Germans are intent” on being an “advocate for multilateral solutions to global problems” within the European Union. …
the 60th Anniversary of the signing of the Élysée Treaty in Paris. … In a Franco-German declaration published for the celebration, they declare that they will work together for a European Union that is “more resilient, more sustainable and more capable to act independently” than is currently the case. …
In reference to Berlin’s plans to increase the defense budget, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that Germany is “the largest national economy in Europe.” “Therefore, we should also aim at having the strongest and best equipped army in the EU.” https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/news/detail/9140

Now, notice the following from last December:

Berlin wants EU to be ‘Fourth German Reich’, says Poland’s Kaczynski
24 December 2022
Poland’s national-populist leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski accused Germany of trying to turn the European Union into a federalist “Fourth German Reich” in an interview published Friday.
There are countries that “are not enthusiastic about the prospect of building a German Fourth Reich on the basis of the EU,” the Law and Justice (PiS) party president told Polish far-right daily GPC.
According to Kaczynski, who is also Poland’s deputy prime minister in charge of national security, the term “Fourth German Reich” “has nothing negative about it, as it is not the Third Reich but the First”, i.e. the Holy Roman Empire.
During the recent visit of the new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Poland, his Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki described the German coalition government’s support for greater federalism in the European Union as “utopian and therefore dangerous” and reiterated

In February of l2021, State of the Nation (SOTN) reported that some Germans were attempting to engineer a Fourth reich:

The Fake ‘GREAT RESET’ & The End Of Civilization As We Know It … The Fourth Reich
A certifiably crazy German engineer (and phony economist) — Klaus Schwab — was selected by the NWO cabal to pitch a GREAT RESET that is really a “great incarceration of the human race”.
The following excerpt from a highly detailed exposé entitled Schwab Family Values says it all:
The last question that should be asked about the real motivations behind the actions of Herr Schwab, may be the most important for the future of humanity: Is Klaus Schwab trying to create the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or is he trying to create the Fourth Reich?
Clearly, Schwab was installed at the WEF so he could advance the New World Order agenda in the wake of the global chaos …
They are also using key elements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to accomplish these goals planet-wide, which will essentially transform the world into a Fourth Reich where the super elites rule by remote via a tyrannical technocracy. …
Just consider how German Chancellor Angela Merkel was able to take over virtually all of Europe, adroitly using the European Union government, without firing a single shot. …
Germany was able to pull this off because they possessed the most Deutsche Marks. Even though Deutsche Bank has been virtually been bankrupted in the process, Merkel has has successfully revitalized the Third Reich. …
The Fourth Reich
Now what is very confounding about the emerging Fourth Reich is that it’s not just a Fascist superstate. In point of fact, the rapidly manifesting Fourth Reich also has many attributes of a communist regime controlled by a still concealed One World Government. …
Consider this statement taken from Merkel’s Wikipedia page.
At the Academy of Sciences, she became a member of its FDJ secretariat. According to her former colleagues, she openly propagated Marxism as the secretary for “Agitation and Propaganda”.
How ironic that a German Chancellor would be a closet communist who successfully conquered the European continent using Nazi tactics and fascist strategies. …
This analysis only grazes the tiny tip of the colossal iceberg known as the New World Order controlled by a secret One World Government that is really the Fourth Reich being cunningly ushered in via the Fourth Industrial Revolution. …
The GREAT RESET is truly all about one thing: locking down humanity so securely that no one will pose a real threat to the power elite. 02/27/21 http://stateofthenation.co/?p=54171

Could pandemics or other ‘crises’ lead to a ‘fourth reich’?

Yes.

As far as huge changes coming, notice something about Germany’s history published decades ago by the old Worldwide Church of God:

In 1933 Adolf Hitler, using Germany’s growing economic crisis as a stepping-stone to power, gained control of Germany, inaugurating the Third Reich of German history.

It quickly became clear that Hitler’s geopolitical aims far transcended his own country’s borders. Hitler held an unshakable conviction that his German Reich would one day rule all of Europe — and from there seize the leadership of the world! He dreamed of a “new world order” that would remake the political face of the earth, with himself at its helm.

In 1939 Hitler began in earnest his struggle for the mastery of the world. (Stump K. Coming Soon – A New World Order. Good News, 1985)

Adolf Hitler used an economic crisis to rise up and form his so-called third reich.

Could there be some type of a ‘fourth reich’ this century to follow the ‘third reich’ of last century?

The old Radio Church of God thought so, even decades earlier:

The “German Problem” is not dead. Germans are thinking more than ever of an undivided Reich – and of an undivided Europe! … On the 17th of June, Germans celebrated a national holiday a day dedicated to AN UNDIVIDED GERMANY. Stores closed. No one worked. The striking thing is that this day signifies something that has not happened yet! Most holidays commemorate an event – something that has already taken place. Not this one – it looks forward to an event which all Germans hope for and even pray for – AN UNDIVIDED GERMANY! (Kelly R. The March for an Undivided Germany. Plain Truth, September 1964)

Well, since that came out, East and West Germany united, the European Union formed, and a European currency has been implemented.

So, is a ‘fourth reich’ in the process of forming? Some in Germany and elsewhere seem to think so.

Back in 2015, a reader sent a link to the following from the German publication Der Spiegel:

‘The Fourth Reich’: What Some Europeans See When They Look at Germany
23 March 2015
People have even begun talking about the “Fourth Reich,” a reference to the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler. That may sound absurd given that today’s Germany is a successful democracy without a trace of national-socialism — and that no one would actually associate Merkel with Nazism. But further reflection on the word “Reich,” or empire, may not be entirely out of place. The term refers to a dominion, with a central power exerting control over many different peoples. According to this definition, would it be wrong to speak of a German Reich in the economic realm? …
A heavy accusation has been levelled at Germany — by some in Greece, in Spain and in France but also by some in Great Britain and in the United States. The euro crisis, a certain breed of politicians, journalists and economists argue, has allowed Germany to dominate Southern Europe and to suffocate it in order to impose its principles even as its export policy has meant that the country has profited from that same currency crisis more than any other country. Germany’s image in some countries has become one of an egotistical economic occupier flanked by smaller Northern European countries from the same mold. …
‘The Blood of Our People’
The fear of German hegemony in Europe is likely nowhere so great as it is in France, which was at least partially occupied by its neighbor three times during an 80-year period. In recent years, “Germanophobia” has increased dramatically across the political spectrum, from Front National to the leftist wing of the governing Socialists. That has partially served to distract attention from political leaders’ own failures to implement reform, but they are nonetheless sentiments that deserve to be taken seriously.
The leftist French intellectual Emmanuel Todd warns that Germany is “increasingly pursuing politics of power and of hidden expansion.” Europe, he says, is being ruled by a Germany which, in its past, has constantly fluctuated between reason and megalomania. Since reunification, Todd says, Germany has brought a huge area of Eastern Europe under its control, a region once under the influence of the Soviets, to use it for its own economic aims.
In Athens, in a building belonging to the Ministry of Culture, Nikos Xydakis, deputy culture minister for the Syriza government, echoes the sentiment.
“It is as though my country were experiencing the consequences of war,” he says. European savings policies have ruined Greece, he says: “We have lost a quarter of our gross domestic product and a quarter of our population is unemployed.” Furthermore, he said, Greece didn’t ask for emergency loans, they were forced upon the country together with the cost-cutting program. “Now we are paying with the blood of our people.”
Germany, he says, has become too powerful in Europe. The country, he concedes, is a leader both politically and economically. “But those wanting to be a leader have to behave like one too.” Germany, he says, should be more generous and stop viewing weaker countries in Europe as its inferiors. …
Since the turn of the millennium, Germany’s trade surplus has almost quadrupled and now stands at €217 billion ($236.4 billion). With France alone, the surplus was €30 billion in 2014. Even if exports to euro-zone member states dropped as a result of the crisis, no other country in the world has a trade surplus as large as Germany’s. Why is that? Is it because of aggressive trade policy? …
Germany seeks to be an economic power, but not a military one. Its nationalism is based on economic output and export statistics, not on a desire to become a geo-political power. The same dilemma can be seen in the role Germany has played in the Ukraine crisis. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-power-in-the-age-of-the-euro-crisis-a-1024714.html

Many in Europe are concerned that Germany is simply too big of an economic power. However, without the economic might of Germany, the European Union would have even more difficulties sticking together.

But the idea that Germany does not want to be a military power is simply not the case.

This does not mean that everyone in Germany wants it to militarily dominate the world, but Bible prophecy shows that deep down, those there do want to dominate.

Notice the following prophecy:

5 “Woe to Assyria, the rod of My anger
And the staff in whose hand is My indignation.
6 I will send him against an ungodly nation,
And against the people of My wrath
I will give him charge,
To seize the spoil, to take the prey,
And to tread them down like the mire of the streets.
7 Yet he does not mean so,
Nor does his heart think so;
But it is in his heart to destroy,
And cut off not a few nations.
8 For he says,
‘Are not my princes altogether kings? (Isaiah 10:5-8)

Notice that the leader of the final empire will not think that he wants to destroy nations, but he really does, and really will.

Notice that Isaiah tells of a time when the end time Assyrian power will be sent against an ungodly (NKJV), “hypocritical” (KJV) nation. The Hebrew word used signifies being “soiled” or impious, and certainly that is now the case for the nation known as the United States. The Snowden leaks of USA espionage and other USA issues have enraged the Germans.

Not only do they feel that the USA has been hypocritical related to Snowden’s leaks, they were outraged to learn that according to leaked documents from the National Security Agency (NSA), Germany was one of the most spied upon nations by the USA. Another NSA document said that the only nations that the USA considered to be “close friends” that did not warrant extensive USA espionage was the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic dominated lands. Germany and others have noticed this and will take steps against them later (cf. Daniel 11:39; Psalm 83:-3-8). And then there was German distaste of US President Donald Trump.

Here is some information from 2019 related to a possible fourth reich:

3 May 2019
In “The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present,” historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld brings his counterfactual “what if” approach to the idea of a new empire based on Nazi ideals. … “The case of postwar Germany makes it clear that western fears about a Nazi return to power were far from unfounded and that the concerns about a Fourth Reich served a useful function in making people vigilant about defending against such a possibility,” said Rosenfeld in an exchange with The Times of Israel. …
In Rosenfeld’s assessment, today the idea of a Fourth Reich has entered an unprecedented heyday.
“The Fourth Reich is currently experiencing a new phase of normalization,” wrote Rosenfeld, whose latest book was published in March. “Thanks to the tumultuous political upheaval throughout the western world, the concept is becoming increasingly universalized. The election of Donald Trump, the many unending conflicts in the Middle East, and the continuing crisis of the European Union have made the prospect of a future Reich highly relevant.”
In Europe, according to Rosenfeld, the prospect of a Fourth Reich is raised by European Union critics on both the Left and Right: Some claim Germany has turned the EU into a kind of economic Reich. https://www.timesofisrael.com/siren-call-of-a-fourth-reich-is-spreading-warns-nazi-germany-expert/
30 March 2019

Fourth Reich …
Some of us — and I plead guilty to this — have used the term simply to describe the present German state in its reunified, Europe-dominating form. While of course such usage is a bit of a tease, it also seems to be a matter of fact. As Professor Rosenfeld reminds us, ‘Reich’ in German means ‘realm’ or, as we would probably say today, ‘polity’. And so since the two fractured pieces of Germandom were put back together in 1990, what we have the other side of Holland is the Fourth Reich. To have a Reich you don’t have to have genocide, concentration camps or monocled, Iron Cross-wearing Obersts uttering ‘for you, Tommy, ze var iss over’. https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/03/where-is-the-rise-of-neo-nazism-around-europe-leading/

What exactly is the ‘fourth reich’? Notice one interpretation:

The Fourth Reich (German: Viertes Reich) is a theoretical future German empire, following the First Reich (the Holy Roman Empire, 962–1806), the Second Reich (Imperial Germany, 1871–1918) and the Third Reich (Nazi Germany, 1933–1945). (Wikipedia, accessed 04/03/15)

Some believe that Germany already has had a type of fourth reich as it has been able to dominate European matters at least for the past decade or so. Poland and some others have expressed concerns.

Biblically, the final European King of the North will lead a revived ‘Holy Roman Empire.’ This will be the empire of the Beast power of Revelation 13. This new world order, which will have German dominance, will in a sense be its fourth militaristic reich (reich means reign).

Technology will, in my view, be key in the establishment of a militaristic fourth reich, consistent with scriptures such as Revelation 13:4.

But what about the use of a pandemic and other crises to rise up?

The Bible shows that the final Beast leader will attain power after the start of the ride of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Specifically, after the fourth one, which DOES INVOLVE A PANDEMIC. One MUCH WORSE than COVID-19!

Related to that, the Continuing Church of God put out the following sermon on its ContinuingCOG channel:

1:16:57
Fourth Horseman, COVID, and the Rise of the Beast of Revelation
The 6th chapter of the Book of Revelation tells of the ride of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. What do each represent? Is the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, part of the fourth horseman? Does the Bible point to around 2 billion people dying from hunger, war, and the beasts of the earth? Was the ancient Roman Empire impacted by pestilences? What about the black death, also known as the Bubonic plague? Are disease epidemics part of the beginning of sorrow and troubles that Jesus spoke about in Matthew 24 and Mark 13? Does the pale green horseman represent Islam? Could genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or synthetic biology cause or contribute to coming pandemics? Is chemical and biological warfare (CBW) a real threat to humanity? What about a doomsday bug or antibiotic resistant superbugs? Is fear a contagion that will help people move away from democracy? Will scientists be able to stop what is coming? Is the good news that the Kingdom of God will? Could COVID-19 be setting the stage for the rise of the ‘prince,’ who will become the totalitarian Beast of the Sea (also known as 666 and the King of the North)? Is this leader similar to the Great Monarch of Greco-Roman Catholic prophecies? When is the Great Monarch supposed to arise according to the Eastern Orthodox? Why might Europe be less affected by the ride of the third horseman that the US, Canada, and the UK? Are governments taking steps now, consistent with the words of Adolf Hitler? What seal represents the start of the Great Tribulation? Which Christians did Jesus promise to protect from the coming “hour of trial”?

Here is a link to the sermon: Fourth Horseman, COVID, and the Rise of the Beast of Revelation.

Yes, a Beast power will arise from Europe after various crises.

Furthermore, the Bible tells of a time when that European leader will defeat many (Daniel 11:39-43) and also dominate the world economically (Revelation 18). Germany will be a major factor in this although there will be problems in Europe (Daniel 2:41-43), after some reorganizations it will arise (Revelation 17:12-13).

Unlike WWI and WWII, Germany is trying to get all of Europe to back it.

Related to that, the Continuing Church of God (CCOG) put together the following Bible News Prophecy video on our Bible News Prophecy YouTube channel:

15:06

Germany wants to lead a united Europe

Various leaders in German have pointed to a more unified, militaristic, and German-led Europe. After Russia’s ‘special military operation’ into Ukraine, Germany declared it would increase its military spending to the third highest level of any nation on the planet? German-Foreign-Policy.com reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants the European Union to play a powerful and more unified geopolitical role. Does what he is stating consistent with prophecies in the Book of Revelation about Europe reorganizing and turning power over to one called the Beast? Are some in Poland and Hungary (like Peter G. Feher) concerned about the domination of Europe by Germany? Is a European/German leader prophesied as the “King of the North” to make some type of a deal with a leader of nations in the Middle East and North Africa called the “King of the South”? Is that King of the North prophesied to have a great army and many ships? Could the Beast/King of the North be German? Did the old Worldwide Church of God warn back in 1980 that, in the future, the German people be concerned enough about Russia that it would call for a Bavarian strongman to lead them? Does the Bible point to such a leader rising promising peace? Steve Dupuie and Dr. Thiel address those issues.

Here is a link to our video: Germany wants to lead a united Europe.

Germany is working with France and others.

Germany is re-arming.

A ‘fourth reich’ is in the process of being made, but it is not here yet.

But something that can be called that will arrive.

Although the New York Times author does not know where this is heading, you can.

Military Technology and the Beast of Revelation

Ten Kings of Revelation and the Great Tribulation

Identifying the USA and its Destruction in Prophecy

Is the USA prophesied to be destroyed by 2028?

The Bible, the USA, and the King of the West

The King of the North is Alive: What to Look Out For