Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
This is the first week of October, and the Iran war conflict, whatever term we want to call it, is coming to a denouement whether we like it or not.
We’ve had seven months of conflict, but that’s the wrong word. We had 38 to 40 days of actual kinetic action and then on-and-off negotiations, all overshadowed by the tick, tick, tick, tick to the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 3, as well as the Israeli elections in late October, as well as elections all over Europe.
So, what I’m getting at is this conflict was always framed in political terms. [President] Donald Trump did not have to try to force the issue during the midterms. He did because, remember, seven other presidents said Iran could not have a bomb.
Information came to him after he tried to stop that in June of 2025 that, yes, they still could get a bomb, but, more worrisome, they also were developing missiles that could hit cities in Europe and would soon have intercontinental ability to the Western Hemisphere.
So, he decided to act.
Where are we now?
We’re in the last stage. We are bringing over a third carrier group, the USS Roosevelt. That means that we will have all of the resources of our land-based airplanes, jet fighters, and bombers, but we’ll have three large carriers. In other words, we’ll probably have 400 or 500, maybe 600, at our disposal.
If the Israelis find out that this Dubai hijacking, and there is more information that’s coming out every moment, had anything to do with Iranian agents, then they will probably join in.
And if we find out that the RAF-American joint base in Britain was the object of a terrorist attack by British subjects who were influenced, paid for, or trained by Iran, that will add a different dimension as well.
But for now, Iran is desperate.
How do we know that? Because we don’t have any news people in there. We don’t have any embedded troops, as I keep saying. We only have people calling out, and usually when they call out to their relatives or friends to assure them of the terrible conditions, the next thing they know, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is at their door.
So, you have to gauge it by the attitude of Iran.
They’re doing two or three things right now.
No. 1, they wrote a letter—it’s 25 pages long. You should all read it—to the American people. But it isn’t really to the American people. It’s to half the American people. It’s to the Left. They have gleaned and absorbed the message from the Left in the Senate, in the House, and in popular culture that this is an illegal, immoral war that we’ve already lost. The Strait of Hormuz is hopelessly closed. And that has emboldened them.
So, they’re now saying: Why don’t you people take it to the next step and join us and vote in the midterms to get rid of this horrific, warmongering, evil Donald Trump regime?
They feel … and they don’t understand American politics, obviously, because whatever happens in the midterms, the Democratic Party is not going to get 60 seats and get a veto-proof Congress. It’s not going to happen.
So, that’s not going to stop Donald Trump, but they think it is.
The second thing they’ve done is that they have said, now we want to negotiate with Donald Trump. We want to negotiate, which means we’ve been at this seven months. They want another two, three, or four months while they try to figure out how they reclose the Straits of Hormuz.
Third, they have threatened us with new weapons. We have new weapons. We have new ways of killing you. We’re going to unleash them.
I don’t know if that was referring to the terrorist attacks in Britain and over Dubai, but we’ll see.
What’s the actual status?
For some reason, we only belatedly started to really crush Iran. I don’t know why we didn’t have a complete banking boycott, freezing of all assets, a secondary boycott of anybody who trades with Iran or enters financial transactions with them. We would also boycott them. I don’t know why we didn’t have a complete embargo on their airspace, but we didn’t.
Now we do.
They are getting no income, but 90% to 95% of other countries’ ships that want Gulf oil are now coming in. They can’t stop them.
And now we’re going to have more assets.
So, one way or another, this regime is going to implode. It may implode after the midterms. It may implode in three or four months.
There is only one thing that can save the Iranian theocratic terrorist regime. One thing. And that is if, for some reason, popular opinion, or the Trump administration, loses its nerve and they begin another monthlong cycle of negotiations, and they allow that regime certain exemptions, then all of this will be for naught.
We are very, very close. The United States is very, very close to doing something that no one ever anticipated: so hurting, so injuring this terrorist, murderous regime that either the people will now go out in the streets and overthrow it, or it will be too weak to operate as a terrorist home base for Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and terrorists worldwide, or Donald Trump, in frustration, will destroy the regime’s ability to make war for 20 years.
He will hit dual-use targets, and then he will leave.
But in any case, they only have one chance, and that is now to call off the United States military and the United States financial architects of this embargo and somehow squeeze or slither out of the noose that they put their head in.
Let’s hope that does not happen. We stay the course, and I think very soon, in a year, a lot less than a year, or two years, that regime will either fall or be taken over by moderate elements, and the Middle East will look like a completely different place.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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.