In his recent speech, President Trump suggested that he may end military action against Iran without the United States securing the opening of the Hormuz strait through direct military action. This strait, through which passed much oil designated for European and Asian countries, does not directly impact the United States, which has enormous oil reserves that are not sent through Hormuz. Other countries are more directly impacted by Iran’s illegal actions.
The United States is, however, indirectly impacted by the closure because of the increase in the price of oil which, at least until now, has been globally determined. But why is that so? Oil is a commodity like many others, and nations sell many commodities, with private companies or individual governments setting different prices, depending on many factors. That’s called competition and the open marketplace. But under current practices, oil prices are not subject to the usual competitive marketplace but rather to a price based on a single global market determination.
There may be good reasons for such global price fixing, but they are not inherent in the nature of the product itself or in the nature of world markets in general. Most informed people with whom I have discussed this issue have no idea why the pricing of oil is not subject to the usual competition involving most other commodities. Even local gas stations compete with other over the retail price of a fill up, so why should the wholesale price of oil fixed by global conglomerates? An understandable explanation — more than just “that’s the way it’s always been” — is required.
So President Trump’s next challenge is to figure out a way of delinking the price of American oil from the fixed global price, if that can be feasibly done. American companies would then be free to charge lower prices to friendly buyers, including American gas stations. This delinking would fit into Trump’s general belief in competition through open markets rather than fixed prices. It might require legislative or administrative action limiting the power of private American oil companies to profit unfairly, but there is precedent for that in the anti-trust laws, and especially in response to military and or enemy misuse of the global price fixing power to achieve improper military of diplomatic advantages.
Under the current global price fixing regime, American companies are getting windfalls by charging excessive prices that reflect higher costs by other oil companies that ship their oil through the Strait, but not by American companies that don’t. The American gas consumers are the victims of this unfairness, and the law should be capable of remediating this situation.
Israel has suggested yet another alternative: to reroute oil currently shipped through Hormuz in overland pipelines in nations that would not misuse their geographical power over international waterways as part of a military strategy. This would obviously take time and regional cooperation. Delinking the price of American produced oil from the price of oil produced by foreign countries could probably be done more quickly.
I’m not an economist, so I may be unaware of considerations that may make such delinking unworkable, but American consumers of artificially high-priced gas are entitled to a commonsense explanation we can understand. It’s not enough to say “that’s just the way it is, and has always been.”
Both of these ideas are better than the current alternative and warrant serious consideration. Neither would be easy to implement and maybe they aren’t feasible. But on their face, both provide better options than the military ones currently under consideration, or simply abandoning the strait and allowing the status quo to continue.
In his recent speech, president Trump suggested that the countries whose oil shipments are being blocked from going through the Strait of Hormuz should be the ones who take military action to remedy what is essentially their problem. That seems right. But in the meantime, Iran is succeeding in turning American voters against our just military actions by causing pain at the pumps. If we can take economic and geopolitical actions that reduce the price of gas to American consumers, we should consider doing so. So let’s put on our thinking caps and try to figure out ways of discouraging Iran from illegally using military threats to raise the price of gas to American consumers.
Alan Dershowitz is professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. His latest book is “Could President Trump Constitutionally Serve a Third Term?”
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.
