(End of the American Dream)—2024 has just started, and already we have seen major escalations in the Middle East and in Ukraine. Unfortunately, I believe that both of those conflicts will spiral out of control in 2024, and the U.S. military is simply not ready for such a scenario. This year, we will see things happen that once would have been unimaginable. But there is no turning back now. World War III has begun, and over the next 12 months things are going to get really crazy.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to kill the leaders of Hamas wherever they are found, and on Tuesday the IDF got a really big one.
Saleh Arouri had been hiding in a very heavily populated area of Beirut, and it was there that he was taken out by an Israeli drone strike…
An apparent Israeli strike in the Lebanese capital of Beirut killed Hamas’ No. 2 political leader Tuesday, marking a potentially significant escalation of Israel’s war against the militant group and heightening the risk of a wider Middle East conflict.
Saleh Arouri, who was the most senior Hamas figure killed since the war with Israel began, was also a founder of the group’s military wing. His death could provoke major retaliation by Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah militia.
Seeing more indications from a few reliable sources on social media that the explosion tonight in Dahiyeh, a #Hezbollah stronghold, may have been targeting a Palestinian HVT. Lots of #Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad commanders frequent Beirut. pic.twitter.com/U2xNnYo8m7
— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) January 2, 2024
This was a very bold move.
It is being reported that the drone “hit an apartment in a building in a Shiite district of Beirut that is a Hezbollah stronghold”…
The strike hit an apartment in a building in a Shiite district of Beirut that is a Hezbollah stronghold, and Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has vowed to strike back against any Israeli targeting of Palestinian officials in Lebanon.
This is extremely embarrassing for Hezbollah, because this happened very close to Hezbollah’s headquarters right in the heart of Beirut.
So what will Hezbollah do now?
Will they strike back?
Following the attack, they released a very ominous statement that warned of “response and punishment”…
Hezbollah said in a statement that the targeting of Arouri “in the heart of the southern suburbs of Beirut” constituted “a serious attack on Lebanon, its people, its security, sovereignty and resistance.”
“We affirm that this crime will never pass without response and punishment,” it said.
I fully expect Hezbollah to respond very forcefully. And Israel will respond even more forcefully to whatever Hezbollah does.
Hopefully things will settle down after a few days. But even if that happens, there will be war between Israel and Hezbollah.
Netanyahu and other high ranking Israeli officials have clearly stated that Hezbollah must pull back beyond the Litani River. Of course Hezbollah will never go willingly, and so the IDF will be used to push them back. And once that happens missiles will start flying all over the place.
Needless to say, the war in the Middle East is already deeply dividing our own society. There is so much anger and frustration on both sides, and we are seeing some very ugly public confrontations. Here is just one example…
A Jewish family of four was subjected to foul-mouthed harassment at the American Dream Mall in New Jersey on New Year’s Day, according to video of the incident shared by a watchdog group.
The Jewish couple and their children, ages 12 and 16, were the target of screaming abuse hurled by two pro-Palestinian supporters at the mall in East Rutherford, the video showed.
StopAntisemitism, the watchdog group that shared the video, said the abuse was triggered by the 16-year-old daughter’s sweatshirt, which showed support for the Israeli Defense Force.
We are going to see much more of this in the months ahead.
Meanwhile, the conflict in Ukraine continues to escalate as well.
Following Ukraine’s shelling of civilians in Belgorod, the Russians launched approximately 100 missiles at major Ukrainian cities on Tuesday…
Later in the day Tuesday the scale of the attack on Kiev has come to light, showing that the Kremlin is clearly trying to send a ‘message’. The New York Times writes that “The barrage — which the Ukrainian Air Force said involved about 100 missiles, including hypersonic weapons that fly at several times the speed of sound — was the latest in an escalating cycle of air assaults between the two countries, as both sides look for ways to inflict damage away from the largely deadlocked front line.”
This is exactly what the Ukrainian leaders want.
They want escalation, because they know that it will mean more money will start flowing in from western nations.
But in the process areas of Ukraine that were once so beautiful are now being turned into piles of rubble…
This is the terrifying moment a missile exploded in Ukraine as Putin launched a monumental attack today, including a record 11 hypersonic Dagger missiles simultaneously.
Strikes hit Kyiv and other cities as Putin showed his wrath at Ukrainian strikes on Belgorod on New Year’s Eve.
Footage shows a super-fast missile exploding close to the Derzhprom building on Freedom Square in Kharkiv, the Soviet Union’s first skyscraper.
Sirens can he heard in the background as flames are seen engulfing a woodland area before the huge explosion shakes the entire scene.
It has been said that “war is hell”, and that is so accurate.
Unfortunately, 2024 is going to be a year of war, and so many precious people are going to die during the months to come.
Of course war is just one of the things that is going to cause widespread chaos all over the planet in 2024.
The most chaotic election season in U.S. history is looming, global hunger is rapidly growing, major pestilences are spreading, and historic natural disasters are happening all around us.
We really are in the early chapters of a “perfect storm”, but most people in the general population still have no idea what is ahead.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now 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.