(Daily Caller)—The U.S. and United Kingdom conducted retaliatory strikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen on Thursday evening Washington, D.C., time following a cascade of attacks on commercial shipping, the White House said.
The Houthis have launched at least 27 drone and missile attacks against commercial vessels transiting near the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the U.S. military said Thursday, operations the group says come in opposition to Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. U.S. and U.K. military assets, with assistance from Australia, Bahrain, Canada and the Netherlands, struck “a number of targets” in Yemen early morning Friday Sana’a time, the White House said, and is the first time the U.S. has conducted deliberate strikes against targets linked to the Houthis since the group began attacking international shipping in late 2023.
“These strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea—including the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles for the first time in history,” President Joe Biden said in the statement.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was preparing earlier to authorize strikes on the Houthis following a meeting with the National Security Council and briefings with Parliament, according to The Financial Times. The Pentagon had already drawn up potential targets, U.S. officials told the outlet.
The strikes involved fighter jets and ships and submarines firing Tomahawk missiles, CNN reported, citing U.S. and U.K. officials. The coalition targeted Houthis’ drone, ballistic and cruise missile, and coastal radar and air surveillance capabilities, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said in a statement.
“If necessary, we will take follow-on actions to protect U.S. forces,” Austin said.
Houthi forces had bunkered down forces and took steps to conceal sensitive assets in anticipation of strikes, U.S. officials said, The Wall Street Journal reported. Earlier on Thursday, Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi threatened to retaliate if struck by the U.S., the BBC reported.
“Any American attack will not remain without a response. The response will be greater than the attack that was carried out with twenty drones and a number of missiles,” he said in a televised address, referring to a Wednesday attack local time that was the largest since the group began targeting commercial ships in October.
The U.K. operates a destroyer in the Red Sea and is participating in a U.S.-led coalition, Operation Prosperity Guardian, which is aimed at deterring strikes and reassuring international shipping of the vessels’ safety.
The Pentagon previously declined to comment on rumored plans of strikes on the Houthis earlier Thursday.
📸: Sailors from guided-missile destroyer USS Mason (DDG 87) participate in a vertical replenishment with @TheCVN69 while supporting Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea, Jan. 8. Led by @CMF_Bahrain's CTF 153, #OPG has more than 20 countries taking part. pic.twitter.com/m9AMaLsoWF
— U.S. Naval Forces Central Command/U.S. 5th Fleet (@US5thFleet) January 11, 2024
After Wednesday’s missile and drone barrage, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) reiterated a Jan. 3 warning from the U.S. and partners against the Houthis launching further attacks. Experts said the repeated threat signaled the Pentagon was rapidly losing patience with the Houthis’ insistence on continued attacks.
“I think that statement from multiple nations when it comes to the fact that there will be consequences – should the attacks not stop – speaks for itself. And I’ll just leave it at that,” Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a press briefing Thursday afternoon.
Major shipping companies continue to avoid Red Sea transit routes. The Houthis over the weekend appeared to target one of the U.S. guided-missile destroyers operating in the region as part of Operation Prosperity Guardian.
U.S. military assets in the Red Sea include 130 aircraft and the warships assigned to the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, carrying about 4,000 sailors and Marines, White House National Security spokesperson John Kirby said at a Jan. 3 press briefing.
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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.
