(Daily Signal)—Victor Davis Hanson: So, basically, what the United States is doing is saying, we’re going to control the strait, and we’re going to let anybody who wants to do business with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, but not Iran.
And Iran’s island, Kharg Island, where almost 90% of its oil is, you think they were so smart that they would—they have a port on the other side of the strait, but they were so arrogant and thought that they were always going to intimidate everybody, and no one was ever going to intimidate them.
They never did what Oman, the Emirates did, and put a port that was a sizable—they have one—but a sizable port in front of the strait. And then had a big pipeline. And they could have got around it because it would have been harder to police outside the Gulf.
So, basically, now where we are is Iran is quickly going broke. It’s going to implode. The population is restive, and we’re in the driver’s seat. So, if you game it out, you say, well, how many days can they survive? Probably a week, 10 days. So, maybe we should do what they’re doing.
They want to just drag it out, and they can go back to that old metaphor: Can’t hear you, I don’t know what you want. Oh, you want to negotiate? It’s Friday afternoon. Let’s start it next Tuesday. Oh, you want to go to Pakistan? Oh, it’s too far. Let’s go to Saudi Arabia.
You could do that all day long, and we’re not killing anybody; we’re just sitting here, and it’s not that costly. And if they keep—if they say, well, you know, if you’re going to try to do this, we’re going to unleash hell on Saudi Arabia, and we’ll destroy … Oh, you are, are you? Well, we’ve got 10,000 Marines, and we have to decide whether to blow up Kharg Island or take it from you and take your oil. We can do either one. So, they’re in a rough spot.
Then there’s another dimension, two more dimensions, that nobody talks about. So, they got this population that’s restive, and all this is coming out. They don’t have internet, but the word’s getting out that they’re broke. And the population is thinking, do I really want to spend half a trillion dollars and build more tunnels and more missiles and drones and give it to all these Arab terrorists? No.
And they justified their reputation and their oppression of our 93 million people on one thing. Well, you may hate us—this was the subtext—but we are the terror of the Middle East. Everybody’s afraid of us. The United States doesn’t dare go in here. Forty-seven years, we’ve killed Americans with impunity. We’ve got proxies in Syria. We got proxies in Iraq. We got proxies in Yemen. We got proxies in Gaza. We got proxies in Lebanon. We have a ring of fire. Everybody’s afraid. Europeans come begging, and they make these little deals on the side that nobody talks about. Well, we’ll let you in the Gulf, and you can buy … You know, we won’t harass you, but we don’t want any support for Israel. So that’s what they were thinking.
And now what? The people are going to say, you incompetent buffoons. You told us that everybody … We didn’t like you, but at least everybody was scared of us, and now we’re the laughingstock of the Middle East. The Israelis are laughing at us. The Gulf states know that we’re nothing. Even the Europeans now say that they want to open the strait after the United States has opened it. Let us in, please. We want to get credit. I’m Macron. This is the Napoleonic fleet. As soon as you do take all the heavy lifting and maybe you guys, Americans, can go home and turn over this prize to us.
And so, the people are going to get very, very angry. They’re going to say, I don’t want you spending any money on Arab terrorists or any more money on your stupid missiles and nuclear program. I want to eat, and you’re stealing our money. And you know what? We’re not feared anymore. We’re laughed at.
So, I think that this, you know, as I said earlier, the Berlin Wall fell, and then some of the Eastern European countries were free within a month, some three or four months, and the Soviet Union took two years. But it was all predestined once the Berlin Wall fell because they saw what was going on. The Germans couldn’t stop it.
So, I think if we don’t give away the prize—because now what the Left is going to do, European and American, they’re going to say, oh my gosh. This thing, we didn’t anticipate this. He’s flipped the whole narrative. If he bankrupts Iran, and they come crawling on their knees to negotiate, or if the people rise up, we could lose the midterms. He could have a big foreign policy success. It would change the entire world. And with Venezuela and maybe Cuba next, and then the economy coming back, and all this oil money, the U.S. is… this is bad, so we’ve got to stop it. So, they’ll do everything they can to stop it.
And the only thing I’m saying is, I hope that Trump does not stop and negotiate with these clowns. I hope he drags it out. I hope he goes in there and says these are wonderful people. Let’s talk. And then gets on the phone. How many million do they lose today? Keep it up. Keep it up. And then at some point, they’re going to implode.
Because if you let them off the hook and you say, well, you can’t have any nuclear weaponization for 20 years, you’re going to get Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg as president one day, and he’s going to say, oh, I feel so bad what we did. Will you take my apology? Morocco gave you 400 million. Well, I’ll give you a billion at night on a pallet. And please, please, please. That’s what you’ll get. So, this is a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
Sami Winc: Yeah, it sure is. I think that the Left and the press has, sort of, relied on the frailty of human memory when they come out with all—because I heard you and Jack talking about The Wall Street Journal and all. It picks on every little thing it can just to say things are going bad.
Hanson: Yeah, it does. Every day. Every day. Every day. The columnists have even got in on it, who were superb. I don’t know what’s happened. They’ve lost the narrative. I don’t understand why The Wall Street—do they understand that they’re going to lose all their credibility with their conservative audience if they keep this gloom and doom and everything’s so terrible, as this Iranian monstrosity may, may, may just implode? The editorial board has been good, in the sense that they said to Trump not to negotiate.
But the news section is the one that’s—they’re all, as I said earlier, they’re ex-Politico, Atlantic, Washington Post, New York Times reporters. And I don’t know why they can’t get people out of that circle that are empirical.
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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.
