I hesitated to post my speculations about this topic too far ahead of the deadline — just in case I’m right. I wouldn’t want to be the guy who tipped the President’s hand. But with Iran’s military incapable of moving in time, here’s my theory.
President Trump is not going to destroy a ton of power plants and infrastructure in Iran. The threats and blistering rhetoric were designed to get the IRGC spread out — moving away from locations they feel are likely to be targets. As has always been the case with Islamic militaries and militias, they use public buildings such as schools, mosques, hospitals, and yes, power plants and other civilian infrastructure to hide their weapons and men, using human shields to protect their assets.
Like turning on the lights in a dark and dirty room, President Trump’s threats were intended to make the cockroaches scramble for cover.
This is not a new tactic. It has been the playbook of asymmetric warfare in that region for decades. What is new — and frankly remarkable, if my read is correct — is the degree to which this administration appears to be turning that playbook against its authors. The threats are the operation. The rhetoric is the weapon. And the IRGC may already be reacting exactly as intended.
The Three Likely Targets
There are only three categories of target that the United States will likely strike. Each is militarily decisive, each is proportionate to America’s stated strategic objectives, and each is defensible to the American people.
Target One: Kharg Island
Iran’s primary oil export terminal. Striking it cripples the regime’s primary revenue stream and applies catastrophic economic pressure; if boots do hit the ground in Iran again, this is one of the places they’ll be.
Target Two: Strait of Hormuz Weapons Capabilities
Anti-ship missile batteries, naval mines staging areas, and fast-boat attack squadrons. Neutralizing these removes Iran’s most credible conventional threat to global energy markets and U.S. naval assets simultaneously.
Target Three: Nuclear Materials and Equipment — and This Is Where the Misinformation Comes In
It is entirely possible that U.S. intelligence believes Iran’s enriched uranium is not all buried in hardened bunkers. Some of it may be hidden in power plants and other civilian infrastructure — precisely the facilities Trump’s rhetoric has been threatening. By broadcasting those threats loudly and publicly, the U.S. military can watch, in real time, to see if anything of interest gets moved out of those facilities. The threatening language is also an intelligence collection operation.
The Strategic Calculus
Think about what this achieves if the theory is correct. Iran’s commanders, fearing strikes on civilian infrastructure, disperse military assets from those locations while calling on civilians to step in and become human shields (yes, that’s how IRGC mentality works).
American satellites, signals intelligence, and human assets on the ground track everything that moves. Hidden nuclear materials — if they were concealed inside civilian sites — either stay put and get destroyed, or they move and get identified. Either way, the United States wins the intelligence battle before a single Tomahawk is launched.
This is Sun Tzu applied to the Persian Gulf. The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Short of that, the next best thing is to make the enemy reveal himself before you fight him. Trump’s unsubtle bluster about bombing power plants may be neither reckless nor incendiary — it may be the most sophisticated psychological operation the United States has run against an enemy in a generation.
If I’m right, this is a masterstroke. If I’m wrong, I’ll have to reckon with my own delusions — and with a decision that history will not judge kindly.
And let’s be honest: the style fits. Trump has always understood, at an instinctive level, that credible threats are leverage. He used this playbook in his first term with North Korea, with NATO allies, with trade partners. The volume and the drama are features, not bugs. They create uncertainty in the minds of adversaries who cannot afford to assume the threats are hollow.
A Candid Admission
Yes, I could be completely wrong. I want to say that clearly, without hedging it into meaninglessness. If President Trump genuinely intends to take out Iranian civilian power infrastructure on a wide scale, I believe that would be both a strategic mistake and a moral one — and I would say so loudly, regardless of who ordered it. Counterproductive is too gentle a word for what that would invite: humanitarian catastrophe, regional escalation, and a propaganda gift to the very regime we are trying to weaken.
But I do not believe that is what is coming. I find it genuinely hard to imagine that the man who has built his foreign policy brand around “America wins” would hand the mullahs a martyrdom narrative of that magnitude. The threats, I believe, are the strategy — not the opening act of a bombing campaign against civilian infrastructure, but the bombing campaign itself, conducted in the cognitive domain rather than the kinetic one.
It will get kinetic where it needs to get kinetic. The prelude is simply theater.
If the lights stay on in Tehran, and Iran’s nuclear program is nonetheless degraded — if the cockroaches scattered and revealed themselves — then what we will have witnessed is one of the more elegant applications of strategic deception in modern American military history. That is what I am betting on.
If I’m wrong, I’ll be the first to say it. And then I’ll double and triple my prayers for this nation because the consequences of bad moves on this scale would be devastating.
As a Bible-believing Christian who knows that God is sovereign, none of these scenarios worry me. This and every major situation will play out how it’s supposed to play out and God’s plan is perfect. Therefore, we have nothing to fear in the end.
The views expressed in this piece are analytical speculation based on open-source reporting and the author’s own strategic assessment. They do not reflect classified information and should not be construed as such. The author acknowledges a non-trivial probability of being entirely incorrect.
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.
