(The Economic Collapse Blog)—If some lunatic shows up at your front door in the middle of the night and threatens to shoot you, does that make it more likely or less likely that you will shoot first? Any talk of NATO conducting a pre-emptive attack against Russia is extremely dangerous, because the Russians are paranoid enough already.
If they become convinced that we are planning to hit them before they can hit us, that could motivate them to do something really, really stupid. We are closer to nuclear war than we have ever been before, and we definitely do not need western leaders making provocative statements that are only going to make things even worse.
For example, during a conference in Brussels NATO’s top military official said something that is now making headlines all over the globe. The following comes from an article posted on MSN News entitled “NATO considers preemptive strikes amid rising tensions with Russia”…
NATO Military Committee Chairman Admiral Rob Bauer stated during a conference in Brussels that NATO leadership is contemplating the possibility of conducting precise preemptive strikes on Russian territory in the event of an armed conflict between Moscow and the Alliance.
It is now being claimed that Bauer was not actually talking about a pre-emptive strike on Russia.
But if you look at his actual words, it certainly seems like that was precisely what he was talking about…
During a question-and-answer session after his address at the European Policy Center in Brussels, Bauer said, “The idea was we are a defensive alliance, so we will only sit and wait until we are attacked, and then when we are attacked, we will be able to shoot down the ‘arrows’ that come to us,” referring to a Russian strike.
He also said that when responding to any attack, it would be “smarter” to “attack the archer, that is…Russia—if Russia attacks us. So you need to have a combination of deep precision (strikes) with which you can take out the weapons systems that are used to attack us.”
Needless to say, the Russians were not amused.
In fact, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov believes that Bauer was essentially announcing NATO’s “real plans”…
The North Atlantic Alliance has ignored all diplomatic protocol, allowing itself to make statements about the possibility of preemptive strikes on Russia, top Russian diplomat Sergey Lavrov said.
“Just the other day, Mr. Bauer, NATO Military Committee Chair, explicitly stated that it’s no longer enough, and ensuring the defense of the North Atlantic Alliance member states requires strikes on targets in Russia that NATO believes may pose a threat to the bloc. I think there’s nothing to comment on here; it’s just that they have forgotten all etiquette, publicly announcing their real plans,” he noted at the 20th meeting of the heads of security and intelligence agencies of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries.
If the Russians become convinced that we are going to hit them first, that will make it much more likely that they will hit us first. We really need to get the Russians to understand that we have no plans to do that.
Meanwhile, a French news source is reporting that European leaders continue to discuss “sending Western troops and private defense companies to Ukraine”…
As the conflict in Ukraine enters a new phase of escalation, discussions over sending Western troops and private defense companies to Ukraine have been revived, Le Monde has learned from corroborating sources. These are sensitive discussions, most of which are classified – relaunched in light of a potential American withdrawal of support for Kyiv once Donald Trump takes office on January 20, 2025.
That is insane!
What in the world are they thinking?
No matter what Donald Trump does when he gets into the White House, our European allies fully intend to continue to escalate this war.
It is madness.
On top of everything else, this week the New York Times has reported that the Biden administration has actually discussed the possibility of arming Ukraine with nuclear weapons.
When Dmitry Medvedev heard about this, he went ballistic…
Moscow will consider any threat of nuclear arms being supplied to Ukraine by the US as preparation for a direct war with Russia, former president Dmitry Medvedev has warned. The actual transfer of nuclear weapons would be tantamount to an attack on the country under Russia’s new nuclear doctrine, he added.
On Tuesday, Medvedev posted a message on Telegram that was quite ominous…
“Give nuclear weapons to a country at war with the largest nuclear power? The idea is so absurd that it raises suspicions about a paranoid psychosis in Joe The Walking Dead and all those who would advise such a move.”
He continued, “Yet I must comment on the nonsense: 1) The very threat of transferring nuclear weapons to the Kyiv regime can be considered preparation for nuclear conflict with Russia;
2) The actual transfer of such weapons can be equated to an act of attack on our country under article 19 of the Fundamentals of State Policy in the Field of Nuclear Deterrence.
The consequences are obvious.”
I don’t think that the Biden administration has any intention of giving Ukraine nuclear weapons right now.
But the fact that they are talking about it is really freaking out the Russians.
I really wish that cooler heads would prevail, but instead both sides just continue to escalate matters.
Over the past few days, Ukraine has launched more long-range missiles provided by NATO into Russian territory, and now the Russians have announced that they are preparing another “response”…
Russia is preparing a response to Ukrainian ATACMS attacks on Kursk Region, the Russian Defense Ministry announced on Tuesday. Last week, US President Joe Biden authorized Kiev to use US-supplied long-range missiles against targets deep inside Russia’s internationally recognized borders.
In an official statement on Telegram, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that over the past three days, Ukraine’s forces had conducted two long-range strikes on Kursk Region using Western weaponry.
As I discuss in this video, many are anticipating that the Russian “response” will be even larger than last time.
Let us hope that the Russians only use conventional weapons, and let us hope that they limit their targets to Ukraine.
Because the Russians have previously identified a U.S. base in Poland as a potential target, and the Biden administration is making it clear that such a strike would trigger NATO’s Article 5…
White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby said Monday that the U.S. has a ‘rock-solid’ commitment to NATO’s Article 5, should Russia strike the new U.S. anti-missile base in Poland. Article 5 is NATO’s principle of collective defense, that if one NATO member is attacked, all other NATO members go to war with the attacker, a world war-style response.
“We take our Article 5 commitments to our NATO Allies incredibly seriously. It’s rock-solid, and that’s not going to change,” Kirby said on Monday, according to Remix News.
Kirby was responding to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who on Thursday said that Russia is considering attacking a new U.S. anti-missile base in Poland.
We are dangerously close to a point of no return.
Once nuclear missiles start flying, there will be no going back.
The Russians have been working extremely hard to prepare for a nuclear war, and meanwhile the U.S. is still relying on hopelessly outdated systems from the 1970s and 1980s.
We must change course while it is still possible to do so.
Unfortunately, it appears that we are about to witness another series of escalations which will push us even closer to the unthinkable.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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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.