(End of the American Dream)—We are far closer to an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East than most people realize. Hezbollah has been sending vast numbers of rockets and drones into Israel in recent months. As a result, Israeli leaders have decided that it is necessary for the IDF to push even deeper into Lebanese territory, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is even threatening to unleash massive airstrikes on southern Beirut if the endless barrage of rockets and drones does not stop.
If Netanyahu gives the green light for airstrikes on southern Beirut, the Iranians have already told us that they are going to hit Israel really hard. Needless to say, that could potentially spark all-out war in the Middle East.
It would really help if Hezbollah would simply agree to stop sending rockets and drones into Israeli territory.
Over the past 3 months, approximately 2,500 rockets have been fired at Israel…
Since March 2, Hezbollah has fired some 5,500 rockets at IDF troops operating in the south of the country, as well as around 2,500 at Israel, according to the military. There were at least 75 rocket impact sites in Israel.
In addition, Hezbollah launched around 300 drones, of which 25 struck Israel, according to the IDF.
The IDF believes Hezbollah still possesses thousands of short-range rockets, along with hundreds of longer-range projectiles. The IDF has said that Hezbollah is launching most of its attacks from deeper within southern Lebanon, north of the Litani River, and not from areas close to the border.
Let’s put this into perspective.
If someone fired 2,500 rockets at U.S. cities over a three month period, they would get bombed into oblivion.
There is no way that we would ever put up with that.
The governments of Israel and Lebanon would both like to see the fighting end. They just agreed to a comprehensive ceasefire plan, but Hezbollah has completely rejected it…
Hezbollah on Thursday rejected a ceasefire plan agreed by the Lebanese and Israeli governments in US-mediated talks, as the terror group kept up rocket and drone attacks targeting troops and northern Israel, and the IDF continued to strike in southern Lebanon.
The night before, Jerusalem and Beirut agreed on a ceasefire contingent on Hezbollah halting attacks, and planned for the Lebanese army to deploy to “pilot” zones in southern Lebanon free from both Hezbollah operatives and IDF troops.
But the terror group’s chief, Naim Qassem, rejected the deal as “surrender.” Qassem said that his group would keep bombarding northern Israel as long as strikes continue in Lebanon. Qassem also urged the Lebanese government to quit the “farce” of direct talks with Israel.
The Lebanese military is not strong enough to control Hezbollah, and so the fighting will continue.
In fact, Hezbollah has announced that the fighting will continue until all Israeli forces are out of Lebanon…
Of course Israeli forces are not going to be pulled out of southern Lebanon as long as rockets and drones are raining down on Israeli communities.
So it looks like we have an unsolvable problem on our hands.
Israeli troops now control a very large portion of southern Lebanon, but Hezbollah forces have effectively fought back “using drones that are controlled through thin fiber-optic cables to evade electronic jamming”…
The relentless drone attacks by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, have exposed cracks in Israel’s defenses, shocking its public and forcing a rushed search for solutions by its military and political leaderships.
They have sown fear among Israeli ground troops in Lebanon and challenged Israel’s longstanding air superiority in Lebanese skies. The drones have also revealed a shortcoming in Israel’s strategy to seize territory in southern Lebanon, build a buffer zone and displace Hezbollah militants beyond the range of antitank missiles that have plagued tens of thousands of civilians living in northern Israel.
The drone onslaught, however, was no surprise: As early as 2024, military officers warned that Hezbollah would likely start using drones that are controlled through thin fiber-optic cables to evade electronic jamming, according to three Israeli officials who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media. Fiber-optic drones have also become commonplace on the battlefield in Ukraine.
These drones have been a major headache for the IDF, because at this point Israel does not have any way to defend against them.
What we are witnessing is a major showdown between Israel and Hezbollah.
And if Hezbollah continues to pummel northern Israel with rockets and drones, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pledging that very powerful airstrikes on southern Beirut will be unleashed…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed the agreement. But he said strikes on Beirut would go ahead “if Hezbollah does not stop attacking our cities and civilians”, and that Israeli forces would still operate in south Lebanon.
Do you remember what happened to Gaza City?
The same thing could soon happen to southern Beirut.
If Israeli jets start flattening southern Beirut, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says that it will mean all-out war…
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Wednesday that Israeli attacks on Beirut would lead to a return to all-out war, linking the fate of that conflict with the future of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire.
Araghchi didn’t stop there.
During that same interview, he ominously warned that Iranian forces “are ready to strike Israel if it attacks Beirut”…
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned on Wednesday that any attack on Lebanese capital Beirut would trigger a “full-scale resumption” of the Middle East war, as Israel pressed its attacks in southern Lebanon.
“Any attack on Beirut will have grave consequences and will lead to a full-scale resumption of the war,” the Tasnim news agency quoted Araghchi as telling Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen TV.
“Our armed forces are ready to strike Israel if it attacks Beirut.”
If Iranian missiles are fired at Israeli cities, the U.S. would likely feel compelled to intervene and the Israelis would respond with overwhelming force.
And once missiles are flying back and forth again, just about anything could happen.
The IAEA is warning us that the probability that the Iranians are pursuing nuclear weapons is higher now than when the war began…
The risk that Iran is covertly pursuing nuclear weapons is higher today than before the US and Israel launched their first military attacks on the Islamic Republic a year ago, according to western officials who cited new data circulated by the United Nations atomic watchdog.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has warned member countries about new nuclear proliferation dangers posed by Iran’s large inventory of near-bomb-grade uranium, according to a restricted document seen by Bloomberg. Before the June 2025 air assault that began a 12-day-war, that material was subject to weekly IAEA inspection to ensure it wasn’t diverted for weapons. That’s no longer the case.
The IAEA’s report underscores how the US-Israeli war on Iran has created new nuclear dilemmas that didn’t previously exist, according to two senior diplomats familiar with the report, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive data. The longer the material remains outside of IAEA safeguards, the higher the risks grow that the material could be diverted for non-peaceful uses, they said.
Of course there are others that believe that Iran already possesses nuclear weapons and is prepared to conduct a demonstration.
We have entered such a dangerous time, but there is no turning back now.
Hezbollah is not going to stop launching rockets and drones at Israel, and Israel is going to keep escalating matters in an attempt to stop the bombardment.
Once the airstrikes on southern Beirut start, the Iranians will have an important decision to make.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that the Iranians are bluffing, and that means that all-out war could be just around the corner.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” 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.
