(End of the American Dream)—At a time when their economy is really struggling, the Chinese are increasing military spending and ramping up preparations for war. But who is China preparing to fight a war with? Needless to say, the answer to that question is obvious. Yes, the border dispute between India and China could erupt into something significant, but that is not likely. The only other opponent that the Chinese would be fighting a major war with would be the United States. And right now, Chinese shipyards are churning out military vessels at a pace that the U.S. simply cannot match…
The US cannot match the pace of building in the shipyards of Shanghai, which have already turned out two new aircraft carriers with a third expected to begin sea trials soon.
The latest vessel, the Fujian, features catapults to launch heavy, fixed-wing aircraft with immense bomb payloads. These shipyards are also building a new type of amphibious assault vessel, and many roll-on, roll-off ferries, which could have a dual purpose – transporting cars in peacetime, and armoured assault vehicles in the event of an attack on a neighbour, such as Taiwan.
Of even greater concern is the vast network of tunnels that the Chinese have been constructing.
We are being told that this network of tunnels makes the Hamas tunnels under Gaza “look like holes scooped by children in a sandpit”…
While the West has been scaling back its military spending in favour of welfare and healthcare, China has been building artificial islands as naval bases and airfields. Less obvious but more ominous, it has also been digging a vast network of tunnels and bunkers that make the Hamas warrens in Gaza look like holes scooped by children in a sandpit.
The Chinese tunnels stretch for hundreds of miles and their plans are so closely guarded that Western intelligence agencies have little idea what is down there.
Domestic spies in the pay of the West, who have attempted to smuggle out information, have been caught and executed.
Nobody knows why China has been putting so much effort into these tunnels. Are they anticipating that vast numbers of Chinese will need to shelter underground during an apocalyptic conflict with the United States?
In recent years, the Chinese have been feverishly upgrading and expanding their strategic nuclear arsenal…
Most alarming of all is the build-up of nuclear missiles. Throughout the Cold War, though China has been a nuclear power from the mid-1960s, its atomic arsenal was limited. By the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the People’s Liberation Army had only 30 or 40 long-range nuclear missiles – because that, it believed, was more than enough. As President Deng Xiaoping chillingly taunted American journalists: ‘How many Los Angeles can you afford to lose?’
That policy has changed. More than 100 nuclear missiles with multiple warheads have already been built and armed, with production expected to exceed 500 by the end of this decade, if not sooner.
The moment the Chinese invade Taiwan, they know that it will mean war with the United States.
If that war is limited to conventional weaponry, the Chinese will win a war in Taiwan, and every war game that our leaders have conducted in recent years has shown this.
The U.S. could try to threaten China with nukes, but if China now possesses enough missiles to wipe out dozens of U.S. cities our leaders may not want to risk a nuclear confrontation.
The Chinese know that most battles are won before they are ever fought.
So they are trying to position themselves for a positive outcome before the very first missile is fired at Taiwan.
Interestingly, as talk of war with China has heated up, the number of Chinese migrants coming over our southern border has spiked exponentially.
In fact, CBS News is reporting that the number of Chinese migrants encountered at the border is now 50 times higher than it was two years ago…
Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 37,000 Chinese citizens were apprehended crossing illegally from Mexico into the U.S.…that’s 50 times more than two years earlier.
In many cases, groups of military-age Chinese men all decked out in similar equipment are being encountered.
Of course they have been trained to say all the right things, and so the Biden administration is letting them in.
Meanwhile, western nations continue to prepare for an all-out war with Russia…
Several European countries have raised concerns that Russia’s war against Ukraine could eventually lead to a greater conflict between Moscow and NATO. The military alliance has taken several steps to bolster its defense systems along its eastern border in recent months, including by conducting trainings in the spring for over 90,000 troops from all 32 of the member states in countries that share a border with Russia, such as the Baltic nations and Poland.
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have been some of the loudest members of NATO that have urged the Western bloc to prepare for Russia’s next offensive in the region. Estonia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, for example, has said that Russia is preparing for war against NATO countries within the next 10 years.
All of those NATO troops are not going to do much good if a conflict with Russia goes nuclear.
As Bloomberg has reported, Russia has 10 times more tactical nukes than the U.S. does.
Sadly, the Russians also have the advantage when it comes to strategic nukes. As I detail in my latest book, the Sarmat is the most sophisticated intercontinental ballistic missile on the entire planet. Meanwhile, hopelessly outdated Minuteman missiles that originally went into service in the 1970s continue to form the backbone of the U.S. arsenal.
The Russians also have the most advanced anti-missile systems in the world by a very wide margin, and we don’t have any anti-missile systems that can handle what the Russians can throw at us.
Considering how the balance of power has changed, perhaps we should have tried to find a peaceful resolution to the mess in Ukraine.
But now that window appears to have closed for good…
A top ally of Vladimir Putin has claimed the relationship between the US and Russia is worse than during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, as the Kremlin accused the West of ‘direct involvement’ in the war in Ukraine.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, made the comments in a public speech, and added that the Kremlin has ruled out peace talks with Ukraine, as its invasion of the nation entered its third year.
Medvedev said Russia would prosecute what it calls its ‘special military operation’ until the other side capitulated. He said that what he called historical parts of Russia should ‘return home.’
Medvedev was speaking in front of a map of Ukraine which showed the country as a much smaller landlocked rump of territory squeezed up against Poland with Russia in complete control of its east, south and Black Sea coastline.
We really are living at a time of wars and rumors of wars.
On top of everything else that I have discussed, the war in the Middle East could dramatically escalate at any moment, and North Korea’s military has been put in a state of “heightened readiness for war”…
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspected field training of troops at a major military operations base in the western region of the country on Wednesday and ordered heightened readiness for war, the state Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Thursday.
The tour of the base, the location of which was not identified, came after the start of annual combined military drills by US and South Korean forces on Monday in the South. Twice the number of troops took part compared to last year.
I am entirely convinced that 2024 will be a year of war. Of course countless others see things the exact same way.
The hot phase of World War III is rapidly approaching, and right now there is a great deal of talk about how to get prepared for such a scenario…
Your phone is out of action, the electricity has cut out and there’s no way to reach food. What’s your game plan?
These are questions people have been urged to explore as the risk of ‘World War Three’ seemingly grows.
With the Doomsday Clock – a scientific invention which measures how close the Earth is to disaster – remaining at 90 seconds to midnight, Admiral Rob Bauer, who chairs NATO’s Military Committee, has warned people to make basic preparations for a potential ‘full-blown war’.
‘You need to have water, you need to have a radio on batteries and you need to have a flashlight on batteries to make sure that you can survive the first 36 hours’, he said. ‘It starts there, the realisation that not everything is plannable.’
Unfortunately, if you are only preparing to survive for 36 hours you are not going to last very long at all once the missiles start flying.
At this moment, most people living in the western world have no idea how much the hot phase of World War III will change all of our lives.
If they really understood what was coming, they would be loudly demanding peace.
Sadly, it will be way too late when most of the population finally awakens from their slumber.
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.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.