They do not drag the vice president, the secretaries of State and Defense, the CIA director, the Joint Chiefs chairman, and the president’s deal man up to Camp David for a scenic Friday unless somebody is about to get hit.
Axios reported that President Trump’s top national security aides spent hours at the presidential retreat on Friday in a meeting the White House never announced. Vice President JD Vance chaired it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, envoy Steve Witkoff, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine were in the room.
One official told the outlet that “things were decided or at least deeply discussed.”
The White House declined to comment, which is what a White House says when the comment would be the story.
The last gathering like this was in June 2025. Days later, Israel went to war with Iran. Camp David is where this administration goes when the talking is over and the maps come out.
Sign the deal or cease to exist
Negotiations are stalled. Trump is weighing a return to major combat operations. On Thursday he put the choice in language Tehran cannot misread. “Now I have to make a decision: either Iran signs the deal, or it won’t exist any longer.”
On Friday afternoon, while his advisers were still at the mountain, reporters asked him what comes next. “If I told you, you would have a major story. But you will see. It is working out very well. Iran is not doing well.”
That is not a man hunting for an off-ramp. That is a man telling the press the off-ramp already has an expiration date.
The pattern is already on the record. At the United Nations in September, Witkoff and Jared Kushner sat with Iranian officials for three hours on the sidelines while Trump stood in the General Assembly and asked whether he should let the regime rebuild or annihilate the Islamic Republic and drive it into hell. Diplomacy and the threat were running on the same clock. The clock is still running. The Camp David huddle says the diplomatic half is losing.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Pentagon is moving a third aircraft-carrier strike group and another Marine expeditionary unit toward the region, on the order of 9,000 to 10,000 additional troops, with arrival expected by the end of November. The USS Theodore Roosevelt left San Diego. The USS Makin Island amphibious group, carrying Marines of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, left right behind it.
Trump has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran that same month, after the midterms, if there is still no deal. You do not sail a third carrier for a press release.
The Houthi tentacle
Iran is not the only file on that table. Saudi Arabia wants the United States in on a planned offensive against the Houthis, and it wants American airstrikes. Trump has been leaning against it. Officials say he could change his mind.
He should be slow to change it, and not because the Houthis are misunderstood freedom fighters. They are Iran’s missile crew on the Red Sea. They have spent two years treating commercial shipping like a target range, and they have been pushing down the Yemeni coast toward the Bab el-Mandeb, the choke point that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.
Reporting on the Saudi plan says the offensive could put more than 100,000 Yemeni troops in the field to roll those gains back. On Friday, warplanes of Yemen’s recognized government hit Houthi movements, vehicles, and equipment around Taiz about twenty times.
Fox News already had the Saudi ask on the record. Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan warned that the Houthi threat is not a border skirmish. Saudi forces had just intercepted six ballistic missiles fired at the kingdom. Trump looked at a weekend strike package in late September and passed. Washington has been feeding intelligence and targeting help without putting American pilots over Houthi launch sites.
That is the actual argument inside the Camp David room, whether anyone will admit it. Finish the regime that arms the Houthis, or get dragged into a second air war so Riyadh can clear a strait while Tehran still has a government.
The Houthis do not have a defense industry. They have a patron. Kill the patron’s ability to ship missiles, money, and orders, and the Red Sea problem gets smaller without another open-ended Arabian campaign. Join the Saudi offensive first, and you own a Yemen front while the main event is still undecided.
The battle is not theirs alone
Scripture is plain about moments like this. “Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God’s.”
The counsel of princes is not the same thing as the counsel of the Lord. A secret meeting can decide targets and timelines. It cannot decide the end of a regime that has spent forty-seven years chanting death to America and death to Israel, funding proxies from Gaza to the Bab el-Mandeb, and treating every pause as a chance to rearm.
Trump has already said the quiet part. Iran signs, or Iran does not get to keep existing as the thing it is. His war cabinet just spent a Friday at Camp David the way it spent a weekend in June 2025, right before the last war started. The carriers are moving. The Houthis are still Iran’s arm on the strait. And the president, asked what he will do, smiled and told the press they would have a major story if he answered.
They already do.
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.