(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Hundreds of millions of people all over the western world are enjoying the holiday season as if nothing has changed. But meanwhile the pounding of the war drums just continues to intensify. If the world keeps going down this path, next year’s holiday season could look completely different. Unfortunately, most people seem to assume that everything will magically work out just fine somehow.
That greatly frustrates me, because ignoring the reality of the crisis that we are facing is not going to fix anything. If ordinary citizens in the western world truly understood what was at stake, they would be going completely ballistic right now. Global war is rapidly approaching, but the vast majority of our entertainment-addicted population doesn’t seem to get this.
Over the weekend, there were some very alarming new developments.
On Saturday, U.S. forces seized another Venezuelan oil tanker…
In a pre-dawn operation on Saturday, the U.S. Coast Guard seized a Panama-flagged vessel called Centuries. A U.S. official told CBS News that the interdiction of the vessel followed a similar playbook to an earlier U.S. seizure of an oil tanker near Venezuela.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said on social media that the vessel on Saturday was “a falsely flagged vessel operating as part of the Venezuelan shadow fleet to traffic stolen oil and fund the narcoterrorist Maduro regime.”
Needless to say, the Venezuelans were furious.
They accused the U.S. of committing a “serious act of piracy”…
In a statement on Saturday, the Venezuelan government condemned the vessel’s seizure, saying it was a “serious act of piracy.”
“The colonialist model that the U.S. government seeks to impose through such practices will fail and be defeated by the Venezuelan people,” the statement said.
Of course now that the ball is rolling, the U.S. does not intend to stop.
On Sunday, it was being reported that U.S. forces were pursuing yet another oil tanker…
The United States is pursuing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, according to multiple reports, just a day after the Coast Guard seized a different tanker in the same waters amid a rapid U.S. military buildup in the region.
If seized, it would mark the third U.S. interception of an oil tanker in less than two weeks. An official told Reuters on Dec. 21 the tanker was under sanctions, and it had not been boarded so far. Officials did not give a specific location for the operation or name the vessel being pursued, according to Reuters. Bloomberg was among the first to report on the operation.
The pursuit of the tanker comes less than a week after President Donald Trump ordered a “blockade” of all sanctioned ships from entering and leaving Venezuela, further pressuring the oil-rich nation’s economy.
U.S. Senator Rand Paul is calling the seizure of these tankers a “prelude to war”.
He is quite right about that.
And now that the Venezuelan Navy will be escorting at least some of these tankers, the shooting could begin at any time…
Venezuela has ordered its navy to escort its tankers carrying petroleum products from its ports after President Trump declared a “complete and total blockade” on “sanctioned” tankers going into and out of Venezuela, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
The report said that several ships sailed from Venezuela’s east coast with a naval escort on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. US forces already boarded and seized one tanker last week and intend to steal the cargo. If the US attempts to seize another tanker, it could now lead to a direct clash with the Venezuelan Navy.
People need to understand that it isn’t just Venezuela that we are making angry.
Approximately 40 percent of the oil that Cuba imports comes from Venezuela, and we are being told that if that oil is cut off the Cuban economy could collapse…
Venezuela remains Cuba’s most important energy supplier, covering roughly 40% of the oil Havana needs to import. While shipments have already fallen sharply from their peak years ago, analysts warn that any further disruption could have catastrophic consequences. Energy experts say a sharp drop in Venezuelan crude would likely trigger a full-scale economic collapse on the island, the Journal reported.
And as I discussed last week, China imports more oil from Venezuela than the rest of the world combined.
This blockade is going to be really bad for our relationship with China, and that could end up having enormous implications for all of us.
Meanwhile, the Russians continue to take control of more territory in Ukraine…
Russian forces have taken control of the settlements of Vysoke in the Sumy region and Svitloe in the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported in its daily briefing.
Svitloe is located between Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, while Vysoke lies close to the border with Russia’s Belgorod region. The Defense Ministry regularly reports on settlements coming under Russian control in the zone of the military operation. According to the ministry, eight settlements came under Russian control in the week leading up to December 12, including Seversk in the DPR. On December 17, the ministry also reported the capture of the village of Herasymivka in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Every time the Russians move forward, our European allies will become more desperate to stop them.
But the only way that Ukraine can win the war is if we get directly involved in the conflict.
According to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, that is “ultimately what the EU and NATO want”…
She went on to accuse the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization of wanting to pull the U.S. into direct battle with Russia.
“[Deep-staters] foment fear and hysteria as a way to justify the continuing of the war and their efforts to undermine President Trump’s efforts towards peace,” Gabbard said. “And do so in this case in order to try to pull the U.S. military into a direct conflict with Russia, which is ultimately what the EU and NATO want.”
“We cannot allow this to happen,” she declared.
Right now, the Ukrainians and the Europeans are working on a “deal” that they know with 100 percent certainty that the Russians will reject.
When the Russians inevitably reject that “deal”, that will be used as justification for what they want to do next.
And what they want to do next is certainly not a mystery, because they have been feverishly preparing for it.
Unfortunately, events in the Middle East are heading in a very alarming direction as well.
On Sunday, the IDF conducted more strikes on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon…
The Israeli military said Sunday that it targeted Hezbollah operatives in strikes in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese health ministry reported one person was killed and another wounded.
Israel has kept up regular strikes on Lebanon, usually saying it is targeting Hezbollah infrastructure or operatives violating the November 2024 ceasefire.
Hezbollah is supposed to disarm, but that never was going to happen.
So the IDF is just going to keep hitting them.
And according to NBC News, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will soon be presenting options for attacking Iran again to President Trump…
Israeli officials have grown increasingly concerned that Iran is expanding production of its ballistic missile program, which was damaged by Israeli military strikes earlier this year, and are preparing to brief President Donald Trump about options for attacking it again, according to a person with direct knowledge of the plans and four former U.S. officials briefed on the plans.
Israeli officials also are concerned that Iran is reconstituting nuclear enrichment sites the U.S. bombed in June, the sources said. But, they added, the officials view Iran’s efforts to rebuild facilities where they produce the ballistic missiles and to repair its crippled air defense systems as more immediate concerns.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are expected to meet later this month in Florida at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate. At that meeting, the sources said, Netanyahu is expected to make the case to Trump that Iran’s expansion of its ballistic missile program poses a threat that could necessitate swift action.
The Israelis and the Iranians both clearly understand that their fight is not over.
So both sides are getting ready for the next round.
2025 has certainly been a chaotic year.
But I expect 2026 to be even crazier.
The drumbeats of war are steadily getting louder, and if we don’t turn back now the death and destruction that we will witness will be off the charts.
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.
“There is no fate but what we make.”
The war with Venezuela started years ago, when Venezuela started invading us with criminals, drugging us to death, and supplying rigged voting machines.
The author seems to be more supportive of Israeli acts of aggression than American acts of aggression.
Spot on!
Sliding down the razor blade of escalation that could lead to nuclear destruction. War is Hell. Pray for Peace. America First! ULTRAMAGA!
I did not know Venezuela possessed nuclear weapons… Sure Russia and China are going to come to their aid and escalate it to war…get real.
They said it’s about oil. We want it and not give it to China who is also killing our citizens with drug ingredients. China is engrossed in another “Emperor” system but this time calling it communism.
Anything to stop the drugs…