(Alt-Market)—In October of 2023 in my article ‘It’s A Trap! The Wave Of Repercussions As The Middle East Fights “The Last War”’ I predicted that a multi-front war was about to develop between Israel and various Muslim nations including Lebanon and Iran. I noted:
“Israel is going to pound Gaza into gravel, there’s no doubt about that. A ground invasion will meet far more resistance than the Israelis seem to expect, but Israel controls the air and Gaza is a fixed target with limited territory. The problem for them is not the Palestinians, but the multiple war fronts that will open up if they do what I think they are about to do (attempted sanitization). Lebanon, Iran and Syria will immediately engage and Israel will not be able to fight them all…”
So far, both Lebanon and Iran have directly engaged Israeli military forces and civilian targets. Syrian militias are also declaring they will once again start attacking US military bases in the region. In my article ‘World War III Is Now Inevitable – Here’s Why It Can’t Be Avoided’ published on April 5th I noted that:
“I warned months ago…that the war in Gaza would expand into a multi-front conflict that would probably include Iran. I also warned that it would be to Israel’s benefit if Iran entered the war because this would eventually force the US to become directly involved. To be sure, Iran has already been engaging in proxy attacks on Israel through Lebanon, but Israel’s attack on the Iranian “embassy” or diplomatic station in Syria basically ensures that Iran will now directly commit to strikes on Israeli targets.”
Iran did indeed commit to a large scale missile and drone based attack on Israel, a situation which has had some curious consequences. Of course, US naval forces aided Israel’s Iron Dome in shooting down the majority of drones and missiles sent by Iran. However, even though there are several videos showing that some cruise missiles hit their targets, the Israelis have been reticent to admit that any damage was done.
I suspect it’s because the cruise missiles struck military targets instead of civilian targets and Israel doesn’t want to release any information on what was hit. Iran’s drones were likely meant to act as decoys for anti-air defenses. They are much cheaper than the missiles used by Israel and the US to shoot them down.
Whether or not these strikes had any real affect on Israeli offensive capabilities we’ll probably never know. What we do know is that Israel’s counter-strike was much smaller than most analysts expected. Does this mean that the tit-for-tat is over and both sides are going hands-off? That would probably be the smart decisions, but no, that’s not what’s happening here.
Israel’s limited response was likely due to a lack of clarity on how much the US government under Biden is willing to participate in the war during an election year. What we will see in the next six months is a steady escalation towards winter, followed by new bombardments with far more extensive destruction than we recently witnessed. In other words, spring is just the dress rehearsal for what will happen in winter.
Here are the most probable scenarios as 2024 rolls forward…
Air Strikes On Iran
I have little doubt that Israel will commit to extensive aerial strikes on Iran this year or very early in 2025, and we’ll see very quickly if Russian air defense technology sold to the Iranians is effective or ineffective. Iran’s drone program may be useful in helping to even the playing field against Israeli fighter jets, but then again, the technology gap could be extensive.
The Israeli public position will be that their strikes are focused on taking down any existing Iranian nuclear labs. There is no solid evidence that Iran has made much headway in developing nukes (they might have dirty bombs), but the notion of nukes is more than enough in terms of public relations and justification for the war.
Iran Blocks The Strait Of Hormuz
The Strait of Hormuz would be at the top of the list of primary targets for Iran. It is the narrowest point of access to the Persian Gulf and oversees the passage of around 25%-30% of the world’s total oil exports. Blocking it is relatively easy – All Iran has to do is sink a few tankers into the shallow waters or destroy enemy ships passing through, creating a barrier that will make transport of oil impossible.
This would also make naval operations for Israel or the US difficult. Clearing obstructions would take time and expose forces to Iranian artillery which can be fired from up to 450 miles away. Once artillery is locked in on a narrow point or pasage, nothing is going to get through. As we’ve seen in Ukraine, a blanket of artillery fire is essentially unstoppable.
Anti-ship missiles wouldn’t even be necessary and would probably prove less effective, unless they are hypersonic. Iran can also utilize its small fleet of diesel submarines to deploy naval mines in the strait.
Once the Hormuz is disrupted and global oil shipments slow down the US military will join the war if they haven’t done so already.
Israeli Attack Leads To Ground War With Iran/Lebanon
A ground war between Iran and Israel is inevitable if the tit-for-tat continues, and much of it will be fought (at least in the beginning) in Lebanon and perhaps Syria. Iran has a mutual defense pact with both countries and Lebanon is generally a proxy for Iranian defense policy.
Iran will have active troops or proxy forces in all of these regions, not to mention the Houthis in Yemen striking ships in the Red Sea. There are questions in terms of how Iraq will respond to this situation, but there’s not a lot of love between the current government and Israel or the US.
The Iraq government did not initially condemn the attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7th and has voiced support for the Palestinians in Gaza. It’s unlikely that they would willingly allow the use of their territory for projecting an offensive against Iran. The use of Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti territory is possible for invasion IF the US gets involved, and the Persian Gulf would be a primary point of attack. But, both the US and Israel lack enough regional bases needed to project large scale ground forces into Iran (keep in mind that bases in Afghanistan are now gone).
Turkey is another staging ground for US forces but they certainly don’t like Israel, meaningTurkey is going to be off limits. Like Iraq, I think it will be difficult to convince Turkey, a vocal defender of Gaza, to support an invasion force or exploit their border for operations.
What about Pakistan? No, not a chance. It’s important to remember that many of these nations have worked with the US in the past, but they have angry populations to deal with. Support for an attack on Iran could lead to civil unrest at home.
The war would mostly be fought by air and by sea with US and Israel seeking to dominate the Persian Gulf. A lot of the ground fighting will be done in neighboring countries. A direct invasion of Iran would be an exhaustive affair with mountain terrain that must be reached by going through allied territories.
Can it be done? Yes. Could the US and Israel/allies win? Yes, as long as the goal is destruction and not occupation. Would it be costly? Absolutely. Far too costly to be acceptable to the western public these days, and a war that would require extensive military recruitment or a draft which Americans in particular will not tolerate.
Gas Prices Skyrocket
Think gas prices are high now? Just wait until 25% of the world oil exports are locked out of the market for months at a time. We might see double the prices at the pump; perhaps even triple, and that’s not counting the inflationary conditions already ongoing in the west.
This would be a disaster for the economy as energy prices affect EVERYTHING else. Costs on the shelf will climb right along with oil.
Military Draft And Attacks On Liberty Activists
Below the surface, there are many benefits to expanding the war in the Middle East for the globalists. War can be blamed for the inflationary collapse they created. War can be used as an excuse to implement even more aggressive censorship standards in Europe and the US. War can be used to create a military draft which will trigger great unrest in the US and some parts of the EU. War could invariably be used to rationalize martial law. And, it could even be used to stall or disrupt elections.
At bottom, the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East and the many other regional wars that will probably erupt in the next few years have a cumulative effect that causes confusion and chaos. All that is needed is a short period of disarray and a lot of economic panic and the public may even forget who created the mess in the first place Liberty activists caught in the middle of these events will take action to defend their freedoms, and I have no doubt we will be accused of “aiding foreign enemies” or working as “agents of the Russians, Iranians, etc.”
Russian Involvement And World War
Given that NATO has seen fit to engage in a proxy war in Ukraine it makes sense that Russia would return the favor and engage in a proxy war in Iran. Don’t be surprised to see a lot of discussion in the media in the coming months about Russian “advisers” in Iran as well as Russian weaponry. Russia already has military bases in Syria and defense agreements with Iran. It would appear that the US and allies are being set on a collision course with Russia that will lead to direct kinetic interactions.
At this stage world war will already be well underway. Russia and the US may never actually try to strike each other’s territory and nuclear exchange makes little sense for anyone (especially the globalists who would lose their financial and surveillance empire in the blink of an eye) but they will be fighting each other in regional wars in multiple spots across the globe. It seems to me that this process has already been set in motion, and once the avalanche starts, it’s very hard to stop.
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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.