(The Center Square)–Years after 9/11, Islamic terrorists continue to target Americans living and working abroad, including attacking and killing U.S. troops. They’ve also targeted famous pop icons like Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, including killing their fans in the U.K.
In former President Joe Biden’s first two years in office, U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and Syria were attacked at least 150 times by Iran-backed militias. In the Middle East region, nearly 190 U.S. troops were injured or killed after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack against Israel.
The majority attacked suffered traumatic brain injuries, the Pentagon confirmed. “TBIs resulting from the blast impacts of missiles, mortars and drones make up 70% of the total number of casualties,” Military Times reported. This includes three U.S. soldiers who were killed in a Jan. 28, 2024, attack in Jordan. An Iranian living in Natick, Mass., was charged last December for his alleged role in providing the drone technology used to kill them, The Center Square reported.
In Syria, Islamic State terrorist attacks against Americans continue, including against three Americans who were killed last weekend, including two soldiers from Iowa. U.S. troops have been stationed in Iraq and Syria to counter Islamic State terrorists and others backed by Iranian forces.
The Islamic terrorists aren’t just targeting U.S. troops overseas. They’re also targeting U.S. pop icons, including megastar and billionaire Taylor Swift.
Islamic attackers targeted her and her fans twice in two countries last year during her Eras tour. In a new docuseries about the tour, “The End of an Era” out on Disney+, she briefly discussed both.
Last July 29, an Islamic man stabbed to death two children and critically injured nine children and several adults who attended a Swift-themed dance and yoga class in Southport, England. Axel Rudakubana was charged and sentenced to life in prison after the attack. Police found ricin, a toxic poison, and a PDF file of “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The Al-Qaeda Training Manual” at his home.
“After his arrest, Rudakubana told police: “I’m glad those kids are dead, it makes me happy,” USA Today reported.
One month later, last August, Swift’s concerts were canceled in Vienna after police thwarted an ISIS-inspired bomb attack. “Never in my life did I think we would have a terrorist plot. We dodged a massacre,” she said.
Two people were arrested for their alleged role in plans to attack major events in Vienna, including Swift’s concerts. In response, German Chancellor Karl Nehammer said, “The situation surrounding the apparently planned terrorist attack in Vienna was very serious. Thanks to the intensive cooperation between our police and the newly established DSN with foreign services, the threat was detected early, combated, and a tragedy was prevented.
“We live in a time when violent means are used to attack our Western way of life. Islamist terrorism threatens the safety and freedom in many Western countries,” he said. “That is precisely why we will not abandon our values such as freedom and democracy, but will defend them even more vigorously. These values are the foundation of our society and make us resilient against extremism and terrorism. It is important to remain vigilant, stand together, and resolutely combat Islamism.”
Swift is not the only American pop star to be targeted by Islamic terrorists.
On May 22, 2017, a suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, killed 22 people and injured more than 1,000 attending an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. It was the deadliest Islamic terrorist attack in the U.K. since the 2005 London bombings.
He’d been on British intelligence agency MI5’s radar more than 20 times, Sky News reported. An official inquiry was later conducted that found that British security services could have taken actions that could have prevented the attack.
Seven years later, this May, Grande reportedly again received death threats from ISIS members, according to RadarOnline.
Islamic terrorist threats continue after nearly 70,000 attacks were committed worldwide in 45 years, The Center Square reported.
In the U.S., between April 2021 and June 2025, there were more than 50 jihadist cases in 30 U.S. states, including dozens of attempts to provide material support to ISIS, Hezbollah and al Queda, according to a U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security terror threat assessment report.
According to Georgetown University’s Project on Extremism, 170 individuals have been charged in the U.S. since 2014 for offenses related to ISIS.
According to a Center for Strategic & International Studies analysis, there were “740 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States between January 1, 1994, and January 1, 2025, 140 of which were [Islamic] jihadist attacks and plots.”
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.