(End of the American Dream)—We have reached one of the most critical turning points in modern history, but most people don’t seem to understand this. Without a doubt, 2025 has been a year of war. There has been war in Ukraine, war in Iran, war in Gaza, and lots of other regional conflicts as well. But as I have been warning my readers, 2026 could potentially be far worse.
Decisions that world leaders make during the months ahead will determine which way things go. Let us hope that they make their choices wisely.
According to CNN, White House officials are coming up with plans for how to stabilize Venezuela once Nicolas Maduro is removed from power…
Months into a pressure campaign that has seen the US military move thousands of troops and a carrier strike group into the Caribbean and President Donald Trump issue repeated threats against Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, the Trump administration is working on day-after plans in the event Maduro is ousted from power, according to two senior administration officials and another source familiar with the discussions.
The plans are being quietly drafted and closely held at the White House, the sources said.
They include multiple options for what US action could look like to fill the power vacuum and stabilize the country if Maduro voluntarily leaves as part of a negotiated departure or is forced into leaving after US strikes on targets inside Venezuela or other direct action, the sources said.
The only reason such plans would be necessary is if the White House really does intend to remove Maduro from power.
When he was asked about Maduro’s future by Politico, President Trump openly admitted that his “days are numbered”…
President Trump warned in a new interview that Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s “days are numbered” and refused to rule out sending US ground troops to depose the left-wing leader.
The president stressed in the sitdown with Politico released Tuesday that Maduro could not be allowed to stay in power as the administration cracks down on South American drug trafficking, but declined to tip his hand about what the US could or would do to cause regime change.
When reporter and “The Conversation” podcast host Dasha Burns asked how far Trump was willing to go to oust Maduro, the president merely responded, “I don’t want to say that.”
For weeks, there has been a lot of speculation that an operation to remove Maduro could begin soon.
Speculation about such an operation ramped up even more when we learned that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was scheduled to give a private briefing to leaders of both houses of Congress on Tuesday…
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other key national security officials are scheduled to brief Congressional leaders Tuesday on the administration’s actions in Venezuela.
The briefing is expected to be given to the so-called “Gang of 8,” which includes the top leaders of each party in each chamber, as well as the Senate and House Intelligence Committee’s chairman and ranking minority member.
Could this be an indication that military action against Venezuela is imminent?
I don’t know.
But if the U.S. does attack Venezuela, the Chinese are going to be absolutely furious with us.
The Chinese import a tremendous amount of oil from Venezuela, and the Venezuelans have borrowed tens of billions of dollars from them.
The Russians have very close ties with Venezuela as well, and most Americans don’t even realize that the USS Stockdale recently intercepted a Russian tanker as it approached the Venezuelan coastline…
The interception of a sanctioned Russian tanker by the USS Stockdale near Venezuela has turned a slow-burning sanctions story into a visible test of sea power, energy leverage, and political resolve in the Caribbean. As Washington tightens the screws on fuel shipments that have been worth roughly 3 billion dollars to Nicolás Maduro’s government, the encounter signals that the era of quiet workarounds is giving way to open contests on the water.
The USS Stockdale literally got directly in front of the Russian tanker, and the tanker eventually decided to conduct a U-turn rather than risk a direct confrontation…
The Russian tanker at the heart of this episode was not an ordinary commercial ship, it was part of a sprawling sanctions-busting network that Moscow has built to keep its oil flowing despite Western restrictions. When the vessel, identified as the Seahorse, was forced into a U-turn in the Caribbean after encountering a U.S. destroyer, the maneuver exposed how vulnerable this so-called shadow fleet becomes when confronted by a determined naval presence. The Seahorse’s retreat was not just a navigational adjustment, it was a public demonstration that even heavily sanctioned operators will back down when the risk of escalation at sea becomes too high.
Overthrowing the Venezuelan government will cause our relations with both Russia and China to seriously deteriorate.
Is that really a wise move?
In addition to threatening Venezuela, President Trump is also considering conducting strikes in Mexico and Colombia…
President Donald Trump has said he would consider expanding his military campaign against drugs targets in countries such as Mexico and Colombia.
Since September, Trump has authorized several strikes in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean on small Venezuelan boats accused of ferrying drugs, as well as a large buildup of U.S. naval forces in the region.
In an interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump was asked if he would consider expanding strikes against targets in other countries with high drugs trade activity, such as Mexico and Colombia.
“Sure, I would,” he said.
If we start hitting targets in Mexico and Colombia without their permission, we will be in a state of war with those two nations.
Colombia is one of the largest producers of cocaine on the entire planet, and more fentanyl comes into this country from Mexico than anywhere else.
But going to war with them would make us “the bad guys” in the eyes of most of the rest of the world.
The anger that we are already witnessing in Central America and South America should not be underestimated. At a recent Christmas festival in Guatemala, an effigy of President Trump was set on fire by enraged protesters…
This year’s event drew international attention after a giant piñata depicting US President Donald Trump was set alight in protest against his immigration policies. The figure, designed with horns and eight legs, became the centrepiece of the ritual in Guatemala City.
Footage from Sunday shows crowds gathering to watch the torching of the Trump-themed effigy, accompanied by fireworks as part of the celebration. For many participants, the act carries symbolic meaning. With many participants viewing the burning of a small devil figure as a way to cast out misfortune and start the year renewed, a sentiment often expressed by regular piñata buyers who take part in the tradition.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is once again pledging that the Ukrainians will never willingly hand over any territory to the Russians…
Ukraine will not surrender territory, President Volodymyr Zelensky declared Monday, rejecting a central Russian demand that President Donald Trump had incorporated into his latest proposal to end the Kremlin’s war.
“Under our laws, under international law — and under moral law — we have no right to give anything away,” Zelensky said, after meeting with top European leaders to discuss Trump’s plan Monday. “That is what we are fighting for.”
We are being told that this kills any chance for a peace deal.
But of course there never was going to be a peace deal.
The Ukrainians never intended to give the Russians what they want, and so the Russians are just going to continue to take it…
Russian forces took control of the villages of Kucherivka in Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv region and Rivne in the eastern Donetsk region, the Defence Ministry said on Sunday.
Moscow carried out group strikes on Ukrainian transport infrastructure, fuel and energy facilities, military airfields and long-range drone complexes, the ministry added.
The line of control is moving on a daily basis.
Kramatorsk is one of Ukraine’s last remaining strongholds in the Donetsk region, and the Russians are steadily drawing closer…
In one of the last remaining cities under Ukrainian control in the country’s eastern Donetsk region, once a powerhouse of industry, life gets more difficult — and dangerous — as Russian forces inch closer.
Over the last month, local officials in Kramatorsk have reported dozens of Russian attacks on the city using strike drones, ballistic missiles, rockets and aerial bombs. Homes, gas stations and markets have all been hit, as has a nearby power plant, causing blackouts.
“There was a recent strike on the house next to mine,” said Olena Frolova, 20, who works in a shop that sells Donetsk-branded clothing in Kramatorsk. “We all feel that the front is getting closer. Your life depends on how our guys at the front hold on.”
With each passing day, the pressure on our European allies to intervene in Ukraine grows even stronger.
To most EU leaders, allowing the Russians to win this war would be completely and utterly unacceptable.
But the Ukrainians have no chance of defeating the Russians by themselves.
At some point EU leaders may give in to temptation and start sending large numbers of troops into Ukraine, and that will put us right on the brink of nuclear war.
Interestingly, the UK Ministry of Defence just announced that a member of the UK Armed Forces has died in Ukraine…
Once our European allies are directly fighting the Russians, it will just be a matter of time before we are directly fighting them too.
In the Pacific, the war of words between Japan and China is rapidly approaching a boiling point…
Beijing escalated its war of words with Tokyo after Japan said Chinese fighter jets aimed a fire-control radar at Japanese F-15s flying near Okinawa, an action Tokyo called “dangerous” and “extremely regrettable.”
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his German counterpart Johann Wadephul in Beijing that “Japan is threatening China militarily,” a stance he called “completely unacceptable,” after the radar incident, Reuters reported.
Wang accused Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi of “trying to exploit the Taiwan question — the very territory Japan colonized for half a century, committing countless crimes against the Chinese people — to provoke trouble and threaten China militarily. This is completely unacceptable,” Wang said, according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency. He added that Japan, as a World War II “defeated nation,” should act with greater caution.
If the Japanese and the Chinese actually start shooting at one another, there is no way that we could stay out of it.
Today, we have approximately 120 military installations in Japan.
We are Japan’s protector, and the Chinese know that.
I have been warning about a coming war with China for a very long time.
But we could soon be facing a scenario in which we aren’t just facing one opponent.
If the wrong decisions are made, we could potentially find ourselves fighting Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Russia and China simultaneously.
Needless to say, we should be trying to avoid such a scenario any way that we can.
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.
Total horse manure!
Who really cares what Russia, and especially, China think? We’ll destroy them. If they thought that they together could destroy us, they would have already done so. They apparently don’t want peace, they are not satisfied with just leaving other countries alone and live within their own borders, so why should we care about them? We are the sleeping giant. Do not disturb us!
We know for certain by his actions that war is exactly what the President of Peace is hoping for.
C’mon Mike, you sound like you’re willing to compromise with evil. just to avoid war. That’s how we got where we are now: compromise. Some things you don’t compromise.
ONE EMP. Just one, will cripple us enough to be destroyed. Of course the same is true of those other nations but they are separated widely. We’re sitting ducks all under one roof. Everyone just ignores EMP because we have no real solutions. No one is going to war over a mad dictator drug dealer like Manuro. Let Mossad disappear him. The country will fall into civil war over control of the drugs and government, and they will cease to become a threat for at least a couple more decades…..unless Demwits here ever take charge again.
…please don’t call ‘Democrats’ “Demwits’,…that is too much of an ‘Honorary Title’ for them… (smile)
Idiotic comments from warmongers, that’s ok but I have 3 teenage boys and there is not way they will fight so the jews can make more money…. SEND YOUR KIDS! BTW: looks like a 3rd grader wrote this article.
Don’t underestimate Trump’s ability to do this WITHOUT war.
Sadly their is a point where all the cards must be shown. Don’t fuck around Russia, Don’t Fuck around China you will be annihilated. WE know what mean for us we are still steadfast! FAFO!
I myself have had enough.