(End of the American Dream)—We are closer to the unthinkable than we have ever been, but I have noticed that concern about global war has fallen to an exceedingly low level in the western world. Many people are just having a good old time as if they didn’t have a care in the world, and meanwhile global leaders on all sides are dragging us to the brink of destruction.
During World War III, more people could die than in all of the other wars that have ever been fought in human history combined. Unfortunately, only a very small fraction of the population is actively trying to prevent such a cataclysm.
By the time most of the population finally wakes up, it may be too late.
The war in the Middle East has been heating up for months, and now it appears that we have almost reached a critical turning point…
Months of relentless exchanges between Israel and Lebanon’s militant group Hezbollah have seen mass civilian evacuations and widespread death, injury and destruction.
The violence has worsened since early June, accompanied by increasingly heated rhetoric. Both sides have prevented the tit-for-tat attacks from escalating into a full-blown war, recognizing the likely catastrophic consequences. The question is whether this fragile containment can hold in the future.
One U.S. official that was asked about this says that it is “a miracle” that all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah has not already erupted…
“The fact that we have managed to even hold the front for this long has been a miracle,” a senior US official said, referring to the US’ efforts to keep the Israel-Hezbollah attacks from spiraling into an all-out war.
“We’re entering a very dangerous period,” another senior Biden administration official said. “Something could start with little warning.”
To say that we are entering a very dangerous period is a major understatement.
The moment that the IDF crosses the border into Lebanon, there will be all-out war.
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged that Israeli troops are going to be moved north for the coming confrontation with Hezbollah…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated in a television interview on Sunday that he intends to move some of the country’s forces to the northern border to fight the Lebanon-based military group Hezbollah. Were it not for the war in Gaza, that conflict might have already been capturing the world’s attention. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is also visiting Washington this week in part to discuss the implications of that escalation with US officials.
Originally, it was my assessment that this showdown would occur in the fall.
But it may happen a little bit earlier than that.
We shall see.
In any event, Hezbollah is pledging that there will be war “with no restraints” once Israel attacks…
The Iranian-backed Hezbollah terror group overnight Saturday threatened to wage war against Israel “with no restraints.”
In a video message, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said, “In case an inclusive war is imposed on Lebanon, the resistance will fight without restraints, without rules, without limits.”
The minute-long clip then shows footage of various sites in central Israel, along with their GPS coordinates.
“Whoever thinks of war against us, will regret it,” the video ends.
Hezbollah possesses an enormous arsenal of highly sophisticated missiles, and one Biden administration official is openly admitting that Iron Dome batteries will likely be “overwhelmed” when all-out war erupts…
“We assess that at least some” Iron Dome batteries “will be overwhelmed,” said a senior administration official.
An Israeli official said that would be more likely if Hezbollah conducted a large-scale attack principally using precision guided weapons, which could be challenging for the system to defend against. Hezbollah has been stockpiling precision guided munitions and missiles from Iran for years, which Israel has repeatedly raised concerns about.
Hezbollah also possesses an army of approximately 100,000 fighters, and soldiers from other parts of the Middle East are already pouring into southern Lebanon to bolster their ranks.
And once all-out war breaks out between Israel and Hezbollah, it is unlikely that Iran would remain on the sidelines for long…
The top US military officer warned on Sunday that any Israeli military offensive into Lebanon would risk an Iranian response in defense of the powerful Hezbollah terror group there, and that US forces would be challenged to bolster Israel’s air defense umbrella.
Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Iran “would be more inclined to support Hezbollah” than it does the Hamas terror group in Gaza, “particularly if they felt that Hezbollah was being significantly threatened.”
What would a cataclysmic conflict between Israel and the combined forces of Iran and Hezbollah look like?
And would the United States be pulled into such a conflict?
Most Americans are not even considering such questions.
But over in Israel, there is a growing consensus that a final showdown is inevitable. The following comes from a recent editorial in the Jerusalem Post…
In the last couple of weeks, it has become clear that a war with Hezbollah is inevitable. It has no longer become a conservation of “if” rather than “when.”
Since October 8, the day after the devastating Hamas massacre, Hezbollah has attacked Israel every day and has been doing so every day since. The group has fired over 5,000 rockets, anti-tank missiles, and explosive-laden drones toward the northern border, forcing 60,000 Israelis in the North out of their homes and turning them into displaced people in their own country with no end date on when they should be going home.
According to senior officials in Israel, the countdown to a potential war with Hezbollah has begun, and Israeli officials have said they have been left with no other choice.
As I have been warning for a long time, this thing in the Middle East is going to get really, really bad. Meanwhile, an extremely alarming incident in Crimea that involved U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles has brought us even closer to a direct military conflict with Russia…
The Kremlin on Monday directly blamed the United States for an attack on Crimea with U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles that killed at least four people and injured 151, and Moscow formally warned the U.S. ambassador that retaliation would follow.
The war in Ukraine has triggered the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and Russian officials have said that the conflict is entering the most dangerous escalatory phase to date.
But directly blaming the United States for a deadly attack on Crimea – which Russia annexed in 2014 and now considers to be Russian territory although most of the world considers it to be part of Ukraine – is a step further.
Russian children were killed by missiles that we produced, and those missiles were delivered by systems that we provided, and Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov is warning that there will be “consequences” for the United States…
The Kremlin has accused the U.S. of ‘killing Russian children’ after a Ukrainian attack on occupied Crimea with long-range missiles supplied by Washington and said there will be ‘consequences’.
Moscow has summoned the U.S. ambassador to issue a formal warning, while Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov issued a public statement slamming the U.S. for ‘barbaric’ strike on Sevastopol, a strategic port city on the Black Sea.
‘The involvement of the United States, the direct involvement, as a result of which Russian civilians are killed, cannot be without consequences,’ said Peskov.
So what will those “consequences” look like?
At this point, we don’t know.
Hopefully the Russians will not do anything too dramatic.
But if both sides just continue to escalate matters, it is just a matter of time before we reach a point of no return.
You can only flirt with war for so long before you get burned.
Approximately 75 million people died during the last global war. If we aren’t careful, many times that number could die during the next one.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
There’s a site called DEFCONNEWS — a controlled opposition site for 4F bubba snowflakes — they long ago banned me?! They are TERRIFIED of real commenters!
There’s a site run by Hoft and his husband, TGP, who long ago banned me, deleted all my comments history there, then used some of my very comments in future articles?! Pure dishonest corruption — still cannot find their original reason foe banning me?!
Bubbabart, Breitbart, banned me long ago for data–filled and well sourced comments – claimed they mistook them for SPAM but I am banned for life there! (The amount of censoring of all people’s comments there before I was banned was outrageous – they only allow vanilla, insipid comments there of no value or content!?)
Would love to comment at “Modernity News” but the Scotsman’s site banned me long ago –could never figure out way?!
My second–to–the–last comment at RAW STORY in 2012 garnered 268 LIKES or upvotes, a record there for me (“The Hidden History of GE” — was the comment) but they banned me for life; out of curiosity, I later tried signing on with different IP address and different devices and different email signons — banned from all directions, must be AS–level or Autonomous Level high–hierarchy Internet ban – most peculiar???
Any commenters conveying serious data are banned — why we have only learned of Soros recently (typically all my Soros comments got me banned from places like Salem Media sites: Town Hall, Red State, Hot Air, PJ Media) — also why nobody mentions the FNIH and Bill Gates, must never learn how the Foundation foemthe NIH is used foe payoffs, huh?!
MASS CENSORSHIP arrived long ago but the chronic lamers still refer to MSM?
When I responded to a bald–faced lie on Clay Shaw by (CIA asset) Edward Jay Epstein, with the testimony of Richard Helms before Congress to source it, I was issued a DISQUS ban by or through DISQUS — had to close down that account and create one or two similar named new ones; of course all your online comments vanish when one is forced to do that! This happened at “AMERICAN GREATNESS” site — shortly thereafter they moved to paid–comments only — not popping $$$ for that, thank you!
I can repot this, but never comment there?????
https : //youtu [dot] be/icUW-YTgo-g
Original comment a bit garbled:
“Foundation foemthe NIH is used foe payoffs,”
Non–garbled:
“Foundation for the NIH is used for payoffs”
This article cited “Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown” — without mentioning his background or “qualifications”?!
Must cite qualifications, or lack thereof — if an Equity General must report accurately — ACCURACY is a must in real news, otherwise it is FAKE NEWS!