Tensions are on the rise all over the planet, and global conflict will be one of the big trends that we will all be watching in 2023. And that is extremely unfortunate, because more global conflict won’t be good for any of us. Considering what we have been through the past several years, we could really use a time of peace. Sadly, as I write this article it appears that more war is inevitable. But where will it erupt first? In recent days, the mainstream media has suggested several potential candidates…
Will it be Serbia?
Things haven’t been this tense between Serbia and Kosovo since Bill Clinton was president.
There have been several alarming incidents over the past month, and now it is being reported that the president of Serbia has just raised the alert level of his military to the “highest level of combat readiness”…
As Russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine heads towards its one-year anniversary, another European flashpoint is in danger of reigniting a second war on the continent.
Kosovo was at the center of the last all out-war in Europe in the late ‘90s and tensions there have never fully dissipated.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has this week put his army on its “highest level of combat readiness” to protect ethnic Serbian areas in northern Kosovo he says are under threat from Kosovo. Vucic says his military will “take all measures to protect our people and preserve Serbia.”
But I don’t think that Serbia will be first.
The major powers of western Europe are desperate to avoid a second war in their own backyard, and both sides still seem open to a diplomatic solution.
Will it be North Korea?
Just a few years ago, things were going so much better with North Korea.
But now with Joe Biden in the White House any hope for lasting peace has gone out the window.
The North Koreans have been getting increasingly aggressive, and this week they actually sent a drone almost all the way to Seoul.
In response, the South Korean military “flew surveillance assets” into North Korea…
South Korea’s military fired warning shots, scrambled fighter jets and flew surveillance assets across the heavily fortified border with North Korea on Monday, after North Korean drones violated its airspace for the first time in five years in a fresh escalation of tensions.
South Korea’s military detected five drones from North Korea crossing the border, and one traveled as far as the northern part of the South Korean capital region, which is about an hour’s drive away, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
I think that the North Koreans were trying to probe South Korea’s defenses.
If this keeps happening, South Korea is promising to “thoroughly and resolutely respond”…
“Our military will thoroughly and resolutely respond to this kind of North Korean provocation,” Maj. Gen. Lee Seung-o, spokesman for the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press briefing.
Tensions along the militarized border have already been high due to Pyongyang firing off a record number of ballistic and other missiles this year, including a pair fired last week toward Japan. With now days left in 2022, analysts have tracked over 90 missiles fired this year.
Tensions on the Korean peninsula are the highest that they have been in decades, but I don’t think that this will be the first major war to erupt in 2023 either.
Personally, it is my opinion that North Korea will not seriously consider an invasion of South Korea until China invades Taiwan.
Will it be China?
Years ago, a lot of people thought that I was nuts for warning that the U.S. and China would eventually go to war.
And I could definitely understand the skepticism, because our stores are filled with goods made in China and our ties with the Chinese just kept getting tighter and tighter.
But now “the Taiwan issue” has changed everything.
This week, the Chinese “sent 71 planes and seven ships toward Taiwan” in just one 24 hour period…
China’s military sent 71 planes and seven ships toward Taiwan in a 24-hour display of force directed at the island, Taiwan’s defense ministry said Monday, after China expressed anger at Taiwan-related provisions in a recently approved U.S. annual defense spending bill.
China’s military harassment of self-ruled Taiwan, which it claims is its own territory, has intensified in recent years, and the Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army has sent planes or ships toward the island on a near-daily basis.
When China ultimately invades Taiwan, the U.S. and China will instantly be in a state of war. And once that happens, the flow of goods from China immediately ends. Are you prepared for that? But I don’t think that such a scenario will play out just yet. My personal opinion is that there is another major conflict that is likely to erupt even sooner.
Will it be Iran?
For years, Benjamin Netanyahu pledged that he would never, ever allow the Iranians to build their own nuclear weapons.
Well, the IAEA claims that the Iranians are now “one technical step away” from enriching weapons-grade uranium. So it is put up or shut up time for Netanyahu.
Either he takes military action or he lives with a nuclear Iran. Of course if Israel launches an attack on Iran, the Iranians will hit back extremely hard.
In fact, the Iranians just threatened to raze Tel Aviv “to the ground” if Israel decides to attack…
Iran has threatened to raze Tel Aviv ‘to the ground’ in a chilling video explaining how Tehran would respond to an Israeli strike on its nuclear plant.
The video that the Iranians have produced actually contains “several terrifying explosions to demonstrate what would happen to Tel Aviv”…
The two and a half minute video – posted by @MEMRIReports – contains violent footage of missiles going off and several terrifying explosions to demonstrate what would happen to Tel Aviv.
‘This is what the first few minutes of the Iranian response will look like,’ the video explained.
Once this war starts, it is going to be incredibly destructive.
But I don’t think that it will start the way that most people are expecting.
As they say, stay tuned for future developments.
Meanwhile, I believe that things in Ukraine are about to get even more “interesting”.
On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov issued a statement that some media sources are describing as an “ultimatum”…
“Our proposals for the demilitarization and denazification of the territories controlled by the regime, the elimination of threats to Russia’s security emanating from there, including our new lands, are well known to the enemy,” state news agency TASS quoted Lavrov as saying late on Monday.
“The point is simple: Fulfill them for your own good. Otherwise, the issue will be decided by the Russian army.”
Other Russian officials have also issued puzzling statements in recent days.
Are they trying to give diplomacy one final chance before they take this war to a point of no return?
Because if the Russians launch another massive invasion of Ukraine from the north, there will be no going back.
The Russians continue to move more military assets into position for such a campaign, but that doesn’t mean that it will actually happen.
However, if Vladimir Putin does pull the trigger there will be no hope for a peaceful solution.
Meanwhile, the Russians continue to try to frame this conflict as a great battle between good and evil. In fact, a commercial has just been released that portrays Vladimir Putin as a Santa Claus figure that is delivering a boy from the twisted values of the western world…
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been portrayed as Santa in an anti-Western propaganda video released on the country’s social media.
The film – made by a production company called Signal – depicts ‘Santa Putin’ swapping a photograph of a child’s same-sex parents for one of a mother and father, and gifting the boy being raised as a girl a football, toy cars and a drum kit.
The video feeds into Russian prejudices about Europe and the United States which have been fuelled by pro-Kremlin propagandists during the war in Ukraine to frame the conflict as a clash of values between Russia and Ukraine’s western allies.
I would very much encourage you to watch the video. It will give you some insight into how the Russians really view their conflict with the west.
The Russians truly consider themselves to be “the good guys”, and they believe that the western powers are an existential threat to the future of their civilization.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration and the western European elite also consider themselves to be “the good guys”, and they believe that the Russians must be crushed at all costs.
Unfortunately, leaders on both sides are not exactly behaving rationally at this juncture, and this has brought us to the brink of a global war of cataclysmic proportions.
In case you haven’t noticed, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have all been deepening ties with one another.
Three of them already have nuclear weapons, and Iran will be able to construct their own nukes soon.
Perhaps we should pull back from the precipice before the missiles start flying. Rational leaders would be looking for a peaceful way out of this mess.
Sadly, rational behavior among our leaders is in very short supply at this point.
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Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
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.
Russia may not be ‘the good guys’, but the Biden administration is definitely a bunch of perverted hoodlums. If the rightful president was in the Oval Office, there’d have been no Ukrainian invasion. Trump’s strength would have kept Russia at home. Biden is a failure. Our southern border is overrun. Fuel is ridiculous. Not drilling is ridiculous. The economy is ridiculous. The DOJ is ridiculous. The armed irs is ridiculous. The trans-movement is ridiculous. The Green New Stupidity is ridiculous. America on the world stage LOOKS RIDICULOUS. Biden is a failure. His entire administration is ridiculed by EVERYONE WITH BRAINS. YET WE CONTINUE TO LET FREEDOM BE SNATCHED AWAY BY MARXIST GLOBALISTS.
True.
I guarantee it won’t be the Amish.