(The Economic Collapse Blog)—I have been sitting here trying to figure out what to write about what we just witnessed. Just like October 7th, the shocking attack on Israel that just took place altered the course of history. This was the first time that Iran ever attacked Israel directly, and I was flooded with emails by readers that were concerned about World War III. So now that the Iranian attack is over, what will Israel do now? That is the big question.
If Israel directly attacks Iran, the Iranians will inevitably respond and the conflict could spiral out of control. But if the Israelis do not strike back, they will look weak and the Iranians could feel like they will be able to get away with similar things in the future.
Overall, the Iranians sent more than 300 drones and missiles toward Israeli territory…
Two Israeli officials told the New York Times that Iran launched 185 drones, 36 cruise missiles and 110 surface-to-surface missiles as part of the unprecedented attack on Israel. According to the sources, “most of the launches were carried out from Iranian territory, while a small portion of them came from Iraq and Yemen.” Besides the U.S, Britain and Jordan also helped Israel intercept the launches.
The good news is that the U.S. military and the IDF were able to shoot down 99 percent of them…
At 7:15 am IDF Spokesperson R.-Adm. Daniel Hagari said that 99% of the aerial threats were shot down, which he said was a strategic achievement.
That was very good news, and in the end very little damage was done…
He said virtually all of the weapons were intercepted before entering Israeli territory and he reported only minor damage to one military base from the few ballistic missiles that did land in the country. Hagari confirmed that a 10-year-old girl had been “severely injured by shrapnel,” but said “as far as we know, there are no additional casualties.”
The Iranians are trying to frame this strike as a victory, but the truth is that it was a huge defeat.
So that gives Israel options.
If a tremendous amount of damage had been done inside Israel, the Israeli government would have felt a need to respond very forcefully. But since the Iranian attack was such a failure, that gives Israel the option of simply walking away.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, that is what Joe Biden was encouraging Israel to do…
President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the US will not support any counterattack against Iran, sources have revealed.
Biden spoke with Netanyahu in a late-night phone call after Iran bombarded Israel with hundreds of missiles and drones on Saturday in response to a drone strike in Syria that killed 12 Iranians, including two top generals.
A senior White House official told Axios that Biden made it clear to Netanyahu that US forces would not participate in any further operations. Netanyahu said he understood.
Biden reportedly told the Israeli Prime Minister: ‘You got a win. Take the win’, amid fears amongst White House officials that an Iran attack will lead to a greater war in the region.
Of course if someone sent more than 300 drones and missiles at U.S. cities, Biden would be singing a much different tune.
In that case, the U.S. military would already be pounding whoever dared to launch such an attack.
And it appears that Israel was ready to hit Iran really hard right away, but the conversation with Biden apparently persuaded Netanyahu to call off an attack for now…
US President Joe Biden dissuaded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from greenlighting an immediate retaliatory strike against Iran after it launched around 300 attack drones and missiles at Israel last night, the New York Times reports.
According to the report, several members of Israel’s war cabinet had been in favor of launching a response attack, but the lack of serious damage caused by Iran, in addition to Netanyahu’s conversation with Biden, led to it being called off.
This doesn’t mean that there will be no Israeli response.
The Israeli war cabinet was scheduled to meet on Sunday, and I am sure that they were discussing their options.
The UN Security Council also met on Sunday, although it wasn’t expected to do much of anything…
The United Nations Security Council will hold an emergency meeting Sunday over Iran’s unprecedented drone and missile attack on Israel, the body’s president said.
A spokesperson for Malta, which holds the rotating presidency this month, told the press Saturday evening that the Security Council was aiming for the meeting to be held at 4:00 p.m. (11 p.m. Israel time) Sunday after Israel requested the council condemn Iran’s attack and designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization.
The wealthy western countries do not approve of what Iran has done, but they are desperate to keep a major war from erupting in the region.
In particular, Joe Biden knows that a major war in the Middle East would be very bad for his chances in November.
So a tremendous amount of pressure will be put on Israel to stand down.
And Iran has already warned that it will hit Israel again with even greater force if Israel strikes Iranian territory…
Tehran has warned it will strike again with greater force if Israel or the US retaliate for the Iranian strike on Israel that used more than 300 drones and missiles on Saturday night.
The air raids, the country’s first ever direct attack on the Israeli state, brought a years-long shadow war into the open and threatened to draw the region into a broader conflagration as Israel said it was considering its response.
If missiles start flying back and forth, events could quickly spiral out of control.
But Israel has always believed in responding with force when it is attacked. And I believe that there will eventually be a response.
Some are calling for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear program. If there was ever a golden opportunity to do that, it would be now.
We shall just have to wait and see what happens.
Even though it is uncertain whether or not Israel will directly strike Iran, on Sunday the IDF was conducting “retaliatory strikes” in southern Lebanon…
In a series of retaliatory strikes, Israel has intensified its attacks on southern Lebanon, targeting several areas overnight and in the early morning hours.
The escalating violence has raised concerns of a broader conflict in the region.
In one case, a building that was a “significant weapons manufacturing site” was completely destroyed…
A source within Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group said Israel struck one of its buildings close to the Syrian border today, as tensions soared after Iran directly attacked Israel.
The source told news agency AFP: ‘The Israeli strike targeted an area… near Baalbek and targeted a two-storey building belonging to Hezbollah,’ adding that there were no casualties reported.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency also reported that ‘an enemy air strike targeted a building’ in the village of Nabi Sheet and ‘destroyed it’.
The IDF later confirmed the strike on the ‘significant weapons manufacturing site’ in the Nabi Sheet area.
So Israel is already hitting back.
But striking Iran directly would be an extremely bold move.
An all-out war with Iran could easily take an apocalyptic turn, and both sides realize this.
We really are in uncharted territory, and it won’t take much to push events over the edge.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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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.