(End of the American Dream)—Did you see what just happened in the Middle East? We live at a time when the entire world is going crazy, and I am entirely convinced that it won’t be too long before the war in the Middle East takes an apocalyptic turn. Even CNN is admitting that we are dangerously close to witnessing an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah, and in such a war both sides would not hold anything back. Of course once Israel and Hezbollah start pummeling one another with everything that they have got, other interested parties are likely to join the fighting. Could that potentially include the nation of Turkey? On Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made headlines all over the world when he suggested that his forces could actually enter the land of Israel at some point…
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sunday appeared to threaten to invade Israel in support of the Palestinians, and to put an end to the nearly 10-month-old war Israel is fighting against Hamas in Gaza.
Turkey must be “very strong so that Israel can’t do these things to the Palestinians,” the Turkish leader said of the war. “Just as we entered [Nagorno-]Karabakh, just as we entered Libya, we might do the same to them. There is nothing we can’t do. We must only be strong.”
That is nuts. But I think that he was quite serious.
In response to these remarks, Israel’s foreign minister is calling on NATO to expel Turkey from the alliance…
Israel’s foreign minister urged NATO to expel Turkey on Monday after its President Tayyip Erdogan threatened his country might enter Israel as it had entered Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh in the past.
“In light of Turkish President Erdogan’s threats to invade Israel and his dangerous rhetoric, Foreign Minister Israel Katz instructed diplomats … to urgently engage with all NATO members, calling for the condemnation of Turkey and demanding its expulsion from the regional alliance,” the ministry said.
I don’t think that there is an imminent threat that Turkey will take military action against Israel.
But without a doubt, Erdogan is very dangerous, and he is not particularly stable. During one recent event, Erdogan actually slapped the face of a small boy that hesitated to kiss his hand at an important public event…
During the event, where the leader was seen handing keys to the new homeowners of houses rebuilt as part of an urbanisation project, two young boys appeared on stage to greet the president after he delivered a short speech.
In viral footage, Erdogan was seen extending his hand to the two children so they could kiss it but one hesitated for just a moment while staring up at the president.
Viewers were then left in shock when Erdogan quickly flicked his wrist and slapped the small boy across the face, before resuming his position and waiting for his kiss.
If I was that little boy, I wouldn’t have wanted to kiss his hand either.
Let’s keep a very close eye on Turkey and all of Israel’s neighbors during the months ahead, because things will soon get very “interesting” in the region. In fact, many are concerned that the spiral of escalation that we are currently witnessing could be difficult to stop.
On Saturday, a rocket that was fired by Hezbollah killed 12 children when it slammed into a soccer field in northern Israel…
A new close-up video emerged Tuesday showing the moment the football pitch was struck. It shows children playing in a small park next to the pitch as sirens start to blare. The youngsters appear anxious but do not initially seek shelter.
Then the sound of the incoming rocket can be heard, quickly becoming deafening, before it smashes into the ground just meters from the camera and appearing to knock the girl holding the phone to the ground. For a split second, the camera captures a huge fireball triggered by the blast.
Children are heard screaming before they run to shelter behind a wall, along with others. “Mom! Mom!” she screams as she runs to safety, as an alarm, perhaps set off by the blast, can be heard. The video ends about 30 seconds after the rocket struck.
In response, Israel stuck Beirut on Tuesday. The goal was to kill a key Hezbollah military commander that was responsible for the attack on the soccer field…
A massive Israeli strike rocked southern Lebanon targeting a top Hezbollah military commander as fears of a wider war exploded.
Massive plumes of smoke were seen over the Lebanese capital Beirut today (Tuesday) as Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared the militant group Hezbollah had “crossed the red line”.
The Israeli military said it had struck targeting the militant commander allegedly behind the deaths of 12 children and teens.
Just before I started writing this article, the IDF announced that the target of the attack had indeed been killed.
His name was Fuad Shukr, and he had been conducting terror attacks in the region for a very long time…
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced the death of Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah commander who was behind a drone strike that killed 12 children and teens over the weekend.
Shukr, who was also known as Hajj Mohsin, joined Hezbollah in 1985. He was also sought by the U.S. government over his connection to the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, which targeted U.S. Marines.
Shukr served as a senior adviser to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah at the time of his death. He died in an IDF strike on Tuesday in southern Beirut, Lebanon.
Now we shall see what Hezbollah chooses to do in response.
Prior to the Israeli attack, the head of Hezbollah had pledged that any attack on Beirut would mean that Tel Aviv would be targeted in return…
On Monday, Lebanon’s foreign minister told CNN that an Israeli attack in the southern suburbs of Beirut, or the international airport, “would surely lead to war.” Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly said that any Israeli strike on the Lebanese capital would prompt a Hezbollah attack on Tel Aviv.
I am sure that Hezbollah will do something in response. But I don’t think that all-out war will erupt quite yet.
I still think that we are at least a couple of months away.
But a day of reckoning is definitely approaching. The Israelis are absolutely determined to move Hezbollah north of the Litani River, and Hezbollah has warned that the moment IDF troops enter southern Lebanon all-out war will begin.
So let’s see what happens. I think that both sides would like to avoid all-out war, but throughout history major wars have erupted “even when leaders didn’t want them”…
Israel wants to remove the Hezbollah threat entirely, moving it back to the Litani River, in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolution that ended the last major war between the two in 2006. “If the world doesn’t get Hezbollah away from the border, Israel will do it,” said former Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz in December.
And so despite the bombast, domestic pressures, the fears and the escalations, the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah continues to simmer rather than boil over. No one seems to want this war. But as Hochstein warned in that same webinar: “Wars have started historically around the world even when leaders didn’t want them, because they had no choice.”
I have written extensively about “the three wars of the apocalypse”, and this end times war in the Middle East is one of them.
Ever since last October, this war has been simmering at a relatively low level as Israel and Hamas have been going at it.
But eventually this thing is going to spiral out of control, and the death and destruction we will witness will shock the entire globe.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.
A horrible shame how the Islamic exrptremist wackadoodle Erdogan violently dismantled the great Kemil Ataturk’s secular deep state structure he created in the late 1800s or early 1900s — truly an amazing construct!
Nostradamus warned of the anticnrist from Turkey invading Israel — once sounded farfetched, but suddenly it is very real?!