Thanks - you raise some important questions and make it clear that these matters need careful thought.

Does this mean that the Lord is always on the side of the victors in military conflicts?

No, of course not. If the argument is valid at all, the church would need some sort of prophetic guidance in determining whether or not, and in what way, a particular international event constituted an ‘act of God’ - and I have to say, I would not be very confident at the moment that the church (which church?) would reach prophetic consensus in such an event. The OT paradigm was more straightforward, mainly because the nations that came under judgment tended to be those that oppressed or attacked Israel. The basic pattern is that Israel is judged through the instrumentality of some foreign power, then that foreign power is itself judged. There are, however, some instances where a nation is judged, or threatened with judgment, independent of any threat that it may pose to Israel - Nineveh is the obvious example. Even then, Jonah’s ambivalence about the whole thing indicates how difficult it was to make clear, unequivocal prophetic statements about the nations. And there was no shortage of false prophets around to confuse people.

God clearly has the power to judge regimes in a literal sense, but has not done so since the times of the Old Testament.

The judgment on Rome (at least according to my reading of NT eschatology) is at least one exception to that. But I’m not sure it’s so difficult to see the fall of the Soviet Union, for example, a power explicitly hostile to the idea of God, as an event like the fall of Rome or the fall of Babylon before that. If we can say that this enemy of God has not finally triumphed, surely we can also say that God has judged and overthrown his enemy? If we baulk at this sort of language, perhaps there are better ways of saying it, but I’m not sure the point is wrong in principle.

After sending us a messiah who liberates humanity on a spiritual level, and not on a military level as the religious establishment of the time expected, God no longer intervenes directly in geopolitics. Instead, God shows us glimpses of the Kingdom on an individual level.

What bothers me about this sort of argument is that it appears to reinforce the privatization of faith that I think has contributed hugely to the irrelevance of the church in the West. I agree it is extremely difficult to evaluate what’s good and bad at the level of national and international politics. But maybe the response to that is not to retreat into private visions of the kingdom but to learn how to ‘judge’ properly - learn a credible and coherent (and humble) public theology. Isn’t the emerging church struggling towards just that? For now prophetic reticence may be in order - but I do believe that God called the church into existence, placed it among the nations of the world, for a purpose that cannot be achieved by withdrawing from an engagement in public discourse. It’s a massive challenge, but isn’t that what we have the Spirit of God for?