President Trump has restarted the war clock on Iran, and in doing so he has handed Congress a constitutional riddle it has spent 53 years refusing to solve. In a two-page letter dated July 10 and addressed to Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley, the president formally notified lawmakers that military action against the Islamic Republic recommenced on July 7 — and with that notification, the administration claims a fresh 60-day window to prosecute the fight without congressional authorization.
Democrats say he cannot do that. The White House says he just did. And the 1973 War Powers Act, the statute both sides are waving at each other, may not survive the argument intact.
What the Letter Says
The letter, reviewed Monday by multiple outlets, describes the renewed strikes as military action consistent with the president’s responsibility to protect Americans and American interests. It emphasizes that no ground forces are involved and characterizes the operations as limited, measured, and designed to minimize civilian casualties.
The stated targets are Iranian military capabilities threatening U.S. forces in the region, the American homeland, and commercial shipping transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
The letter also makes clear the campaign is open-ended. American forces, Trump wrote, “remain postured to take further action, as necessary and appropriate, to address further threats and attacks upon the United States or its allies and partners and to ensure the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran ceases being a threat to the United States and to our allies and partners.”
That is not the language of a punitive one-off. That is the language of a war being fought until the other side quits.
How We Got Here, Again
The United States and Israel began striking Iran on February 28 under Operation Epic Fury. Trump ordered a ceasefire on April 7, which held long enough for the two governments to hash out a Memorandum of Understanding, signed June 17. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps then did what the IRGC does — it kept attacking commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes.
Trump’s patience ran out last week. “To me, I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore, but they’re scum,” he said. “They’re scum, they’re sick people, they’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people.”
U.S. Central Command struck dozens of targets on July 7, and the strikes have continued nightly since. On Monday, Trump escalated further, announcing the naval blockade of Iranian ports is back in force, declaring the Strait under American control, and — in a twist that will delight taxpayers and horrify the foreign policy establishment — announcing a 20 percent fee on cargo shipped through the waterway.
“We guarded the Strait for 50 years, more, and we never got paid for it,” he said. “And now we’re guarding it and we’re going to get paid for guarding it; a lot of money.”
The Clock Fight
Here is where the lawyers earn their retainers. The War Powers Act requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of initiating hostilities and to terminate unauthorized military action within 60 days, with a possible 30-day withdrawal extension.
Democrats argue the real clock started February 28 and expired May 1, meaning the president has been waging an unauthorized war for months. A senior House Democratic aide, speaking anonymously to Reuters, argued the president cannot simply erase months of a war he once promised would last four to six weeks.
The administration’s position is that the April ceasefire terminated hostilities, the MOU formalized the peace, and Iran’s violations opened a new conflict — hence a new notification and a new 60 days. Whatever one thinks of the bookkeeping, the underlying logic is not frivolous. If a ceasefire and a signed agreement do not end hostilities for statutory purposes, what does?
Congress has already registered its objection, for whatever that was worth. The House passed a war powers resolution 215-208 on June 3, and the Senate followed 50-48 on June 23, with four Republicans crossing over. But lawmakers chose a concurrent resolution — a vehicle that never reaches the president’s desk and carries no force of law.
The very next day, the Senate declined to advance a binding measure. Congress, in other words, voted to express displeasure while carefully avoiding a vote that would actually require anyone to do anything. It is the legislative equivalent of a strongly worded letter, answered now by a presidential letter with aircraft carriers behind it.
The Question Nobody Wants Answered
Looming over all of this is the constitutional dispute that has festered since 1973. Trump has said plainly that he considers the War Powers Act unconstitutional, an infringement on the Commander in Chief’s Article II authority. He is in respectable company — Richard Nixon vetoed the law on precisely those grounds before Congress overrode him, and every president since has treated compliance as a courtesy rather than a command.
The statute has never been tested in court, largely because neither branch wants to risk losing.
Which is why Trump’s letter is more shrewd than his critics allow. By notifying Congress at all, he preserves the appearance of compliance while asserting an interpretation that renders the 60-day limit infinitely renewable.
If Democrats want to stop him, they will need to pass a binding measure through both chambers with veto-proof majorities, or persuade a federal court to referee a fight between the political branches that the judiciary has ducked for half a century. Neither is likely before September 8, when this clock runs out.
Where the word of a king is, there is power: and who may say unto him, What doest thou?
The Founders answered that question by giving Congress the power to declare war and the power of the purse. Congress has spent decades declining to use either, preferring resolutions that resolve nothing. Until it rediscovers its own authority, the clock belongs to the man willing to wind it.
Sixty days. The countdown has begun — again.
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.
