(End of the American Dream)—Most people don’t realize this, but all of our lives are about to change. We are moving into a time of global war, and the death and destruction that we will witness will be off the charts. World War I was supposed to be “the war to end all wars”, and it resulted in approximately 20 million deaths. It was a truly nightmarish conflict, and those living at the time thought that we would never see anything like it again. But then World War II erupted, and it resulted in approximately 75 million deaths. Sadly, global leaders seem to have forgotten the lessons of World War II, because now the stage is being set for the biggest war in human history so far. During World War III, billions of people could die. Unfortunately, it appears that there will be no turning back now.
It is my personal opinion that the war in the Middle East will be the first conflict to rise to an apocalyptic level.
On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned the media that he feels that there is “an obligation to change the situation in the north”…
Israeli officials on Wednesday escalated threats against Lebanon’s Hezbollah amidst escalating cross-border exchanges of fire between the two sides.
“We are completing the land and air preparedness, strengthening the intelligence systems, and preparing for any possibility,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told the press before meeting with military chief Herzi Halevi and senior commanders in the Northern Command headquarters in the city of Safed.
“We have an obligation to change the situation in the north,” he stressed.
In other words, Gallant fully intends to push Hezbollah back so that approximately 100,000 Israeli citizens can safely return to their homes in northern Israel.
Another Israeli official has issued an even more ominous warning…
Meanwhile, the Israeli Ynet news site reported that an anonymous “senior Israeli government official” told the news outlet that “if Hezbollah continues to attack Israel, southern Lebanon will look like Gaza. Beirut will not be immune.”
Those are very strong words.
This week the Biden administration has been trying desperately to find a diplomatic solution that will satisfy both sides, but that endeavor was never going to succeed.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials have been making preparations for a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, and it is being reported that “operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon” have been officially approved…
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Tuesday announced that plans to launch an offensive in Lebanon against Hezbollah have been formally approved.
The IDF statement further said it is preparing to “accelerate readiness in the field” at a moment the situation is deteriorating, given the Lebanese paramilitary group backed by Iran has in the last days sent hundreds of drones and missiles into northern Israel. The statement spelled out that “operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon were approved.”
I was stunned when I read that.
I knew that this was coming, but I didn’t think it was coming quite so quickly.
When the IDF enters southern Lebanon, it will mean all-out war.
On Wednesday, the leader of Hezbollah warned vaguely of “new weapons and intelligence capabilities” that his organization now possesses…
Lebanon’s Hezbollah has new weapons and intelligence capabilities that could help it target more critical positions deeper inside Israel in case of an all-out war, the militant group’s leader warned on Wednesday.
Hassan Nasrallah’s comments came as the monthslong cross-border conflict simmering between Hezbollah and Israel appears to be reaching a boiling point and a day after a top U.S. envoy met Lebanese officials in his latest attempt to ease tensions.
And this week Hezbollah also released some very alarming footage…
The Hezbollah terror group published footage on Tuesday from what it said was one of its reconnaissance drones flying over northern Israel, including the Haifa port, as Israel said it struck down more suspected drones over the Western Galilee.
It was unclear when the roughly 10 minutes of footage released by Hezbollah were captured, and the Israel Defense Forces did not immediately comment on the video.
Iran has provided Hezbollah with a vast arsenal of very sophisticated missiles, and once an all-out war erupts tens of thousands of those missiles will rain down on Israeli cities.
There will not be a single city in all of Israel that will be out of range. How do you think Israel might choose to respond in such a scenario? You might want to start thinking about that.
Elsewhere, it looks like any chance for peace in Ukraine is gone.
Apparently the Russians are now saying that the next proposal that they will offer to Ukraine will be an offer to surrender…
The Kremlin now says that the next formal proposal on the horizon will be a document of the Ukrainian government’s surrender. This was stated by Russia’s chief delegate to the Vienna talks on military security and arms control, Konstantin Gavrilov, in a Rossiya-24 television interview.
“There are points of no return. The next thing that Russia will have to offer will be the document about [the Kiev government’s] surrender,” he said. He called last week’s proposals by Putin “realistic” and said they could end the war if they were embraced.
The Russians are steadily gaining ground, and so they feel like they have all the leverage that they need.
But western leaders are absolutely obsessed with winning this conflict, and they insist that they will keep ramping up their efforts for as long as it takes.
In the end, it appears that both sides are willing to keep escalating matters until someone pushes things a little bit too far. Let us hope that day does not arrive any time soon.
Unfortunately, when we do find ourselves in a direct war with Russia we could also find ourselves in a direct war with North Korea at the same time because those two nations just signed a mutual defense pact…
Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a new pact Wednesday that includes a pledge of mutual defense if either is attacked.
The agreement was sealed at a summit in Pyongyang during a rare visit by Putin to the reclusive nuclear-armed state as both countries face growing confrontations with the West.
This is really big news.
I don’t know why it isn’t getting more coverage by the western media.
The Russians have been making all sorts of unusual moves lately. For example, it is being reported that Vladimir Putin just picked his niece to be Deputy Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation…
Putin’s niece Anna Tsivileva has been appointed as Deputy Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation, as stated in the official decree published on Russia’s legal acts portal. Pavel Fradkov, the youngest son of Mikhail Fradkov, Director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies and former Prime Minister and chief of foreign intelligence, has also been appointed as Deputy Minister of Defense.
Anna Tsivileva is married to Sergey Tsivilyev, Russia’s Minister of Energy, who assumed office in May after leading the Kemerovo Region. Tsivileva, formerly Anna Putina, has been previously reported by Agentstvo to be President Putin’s second cousin.
Even for Putin, I thought that this was a rather bizarre thing to do.
But I guess they do things differently over there.
Before I close this article, I also wanted to discuss a couple of new developments regarding China.
A new weapons package for Taiwan that is worth approximately 360 million dollars has been approved, and this isn’t going to make the Chinese happy at all…
The US State Department has approved a new weapons sale to Taiwan involving hundreds of armed drones and missiles worth $360 million, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) has said.
Under the deal that was concluded on Tuesday, Taiwan will receive Altius-600M systems, which are unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with warheads, and related equipment at an estimated cost of $300 million, the agency said.
Of course the Chinese have been preparing for war as well, and those preparations have included expanding the size of their nuclear arsenal faster than anyone else…
China is expanding its nuclear arsenal faster than any other major superpower, and is in command of 500, a top European think tank has warned.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute wrote in a report published on Monday that Xi Xinping has increased his nation’s nuclear stockpile from 410 to 500 in a single year.
The increase in nuclear weapons meant ‘China is expanding its nuclear arsenal faster than any other country’ in absolute terms, WMD expert Hans M Kristensen told Insider.
Most people don’t like to think about nuclear war, because it will mean the end of our society as we know it today.
Someday when the U.S. finds itself in such a conflict, it will be relying on an ICBM fleet that first went into service many decades ago and that is constantly needing to be repaired. The following is a brief excerpt from an excellent Time Magazine article…
If a piece of equipment breaks inside Captain Kaz “Dexter” Moffett’s underground command center at the Alpha-01 Missile Alert Facility, it’s marked with a paper tag that reads either “warning” or “danger.” A few of those are hanging in this cramped capsule buried about 70 ft. below the high plains of eastern Wyoming. One is stuck to the shut-off valves that control water flow in the event of an emergency. There’s another one on a ventilation hatch. The entire command capsule itself is jury-rigged on top of steel stilts because the shock-absorber system, which was first installed in 1963 to survive a thermonuclear blast, is now inoperative. So there’s a tag for Air Force maintenance teams to fix that too.
Then there are malfunctions that aren’t marked. Moffett’s computer monitor—the one that enables him to keep watch on a fleet of 10 nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)—has a flashing glitch on the bottom of the screen. His classified phone line has such a weak connection that he can barely hear fellow Air Force officers who are commanding more than 100 other nuclear missiles spread across 9,600 sq. mi. “You can hear them pretty clearly if you stand on an angle, on one leg, and jump up and down,” Moffett says, smiling. “It’s all part of the job. We spend a lot of time saying to ourselves, ‘Hey, how are we going to make this work today?’”
Most Americans don’t realize that our strategic nuclear forces are in horrendous shape.
In many cases, those running the system are forced to use rotary phones and 8 inch floppy disks.
Meanwhile, the Russians have introduced a new line of ultra-advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the S-500 is the best anti-missile system on the entire planet by a very wide margin.
I have written about all of this a lot, but I don’t think that it is sinking in for most people.
Over the past decade or so, the balance of power has shifted dramatically.
I would highly recommend that our leaders pursue peace while they still can, because we are simply not prepared for the type of war that is now staring us in the face.
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.
