Most of us just want to live in peace, but leaders all over the world are preparing for more war. In fact, at this point it appears that the entire globe is being gripped by a really bad case of war fever. As I write this article, the Economic Community of West African States is warning that it could invade the nation of Niger if coup leaders do not reinstate President Mohamed Bazoum.
Of course the leaders of the coup do not intend to back down, and so there will probably be war. But that will be a relatively small conflict compared to others that are looming on the horizon.
On Monday, we learned that over 3,000 U.S. troops have arrived in the Red Sea…
More than 3,000 United States military personnel have arrived in the Red Sea aboard two warships, part of a beefed up response from Washington after tanker seizures by Iran, the US Navy said Monday.
The deployment adds to a growing US military buildup in tense Gulf waterways vital to the global oil trade and led Tehran on Monday to accuse the US of inflaming regional instability.
This is part of an ongoing effort by the Biden administration to bolster U.S. forces in the region, and it is hoped that a larger U.S. presence will deter Iran from taking control of any more internationally flagged ships…
Their arrival followed a U.S. announcement last month it would deploy a destroyer, F-35 and F-16 warplanes, along with the Amphibious Readiness Group/Marine Expeditionary Unit, to the Middle East to deter Iran from seizing ships in the Gulf.
The U.S. military says Iran has either seized or attempted to take control of nearly 20 internationally flagged ships in the region over the past two years and the Biden White House wants to see more forces in the region to stand ready to engage Iran if required, as Breitbart News reported.
Meanwhile, it is being reported that the city of Damascus was just “rocked by Israeli missile strikes”…
After weeks of relative quiet, the Syrian capital of Damascus was rocked by Israeli missile strikes in the early Monday morning hours, resulting in the deaths of four Syrian soldiers and several more wounded, according to state agency SANA.
The attack also caused unspecified “material damage” – while multiple inbound projectiles were reportedly intercepted by Syrian air defense. Videos which emerged in the aftermath appeared to show intercept explosions above the city in the overnight hours.
Tensions in the Middle East haven’t been this high in decades, and a major war could erupt at literally any time.
But I don’t think that planners in the west are anticipating a major war in the Middle East in 2023.
My personal opinion is that if a big move in the region is planned, it will be in 2024.
Meanwhile, the much-hyped “counter-offensive” in Ukraine is not going very well…
On Aug. 3-5, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) lost 2,040 additional men, bringing Ukrainian casualties to over 45,000 since the beginning of the “Counter-Offensive” June 4. The AFU has approx. 200.000 combat soldiers, 36.000 of which were trained at NATO bases like Grafenwöhr, Germany in the past months.
Writing on Russian Sputnik News, US Maj. Scott Ritter called the Ukrainian attack on heavily defended Russian lines with inexperienced troops and no air support a “massacre”, with Ukrainians suffering losses at the rate of 10 to 1 compared to the Russians. Ritter called the “road to Rabotino” east of Zaporizhzhia “a highway to hell”
Ritter is quite right. Ukrainian forces are just getting slaughtered by well prepared Russian defenses, but more young Ukrainians are being sent to their deaths with each passing day.
This “counter-offensive” was supposed to be the campaign that turned the tide of the war, but instead it is the Russians that are currently advancing…
Russia claimed its troops had advanced three kilometres (two miles) along the Kupiansk front in northeastern Ukraine.
The Russian defence ministry said that it had “improved” its standing along the front line in the last three days and continued to repel Ukrainian counter-attacks.
“Over the past three days, the advance of Russian troops… amounted to 11 kilometres along the front and more than three kilometres deep into the enemy’s defence,” the ministry said.
But instead of pushing for peace, the Biden administration continues to insist that we are going to pour more resources into this war “for as long as it takes”, and so both sides just continue to escalate matters.
On the other side of the planet, the Chinese continue to prepare for an invasion of Taiwan.
And once the Chinese do invade, the U.S. and China will instantly be at war.
Most Americans do not seem to understand how close we really are to such a scenario. The Chinese government is absolutely obsessed with “reuniting” with Taiwan, and an eight part documentary was just released on Chinese television that is helping to mentally prepare the general public for the conflict that lies ahead…
China has released a new documentary about the army’s preparation to attack Taiwan and showcasing soldiers pledging to give up their lives if needed as Beijing continues to ramp up its rhetoric against the self-ruled island.
“Chasing Dreams,” an eight-part docuseries aired by state broadcaster CCTV earlier this week to mark the People Liberation Army’s 96th anniversary, features military drills and testimonials by dozens of soldiers, of which several express their willingness to die in a potential attack against Taiwan.
This eight part documentary would not be on state television if the central government did not want it there.
In it, some members of the Chinese military express their intention to literally lay down their lives if that is what is necessary to take Taiwan…
“If war broke out and the conditions were too difficult to safely remove the naval mines in actual combat, we would use our own bodies to clear a safe pathway for our (landing) forces,” Zuo Feng, a frogman with the PLA Navy’s minesweeper unit, said in a testimonial.
Li Peng, a pilot from Wang Hai Squadron under the PLA Air Force, echoed his statement, saying his “fighter jet would be the last missile rushing towards the enemy if in a real battle, I had used up all my ammunition.”
Do you think that most U.S. soldiers have that same level of devotion in this day and age?
Ultimately, the U.S. military could find itself fighting both Russia and China at the same time, and that is why an incident that just occurred off the coast of Alaska is so chilling…
Eleven military vessels from China and Russia found operating near the Aleutian Islands last week were met by four U.S. Navy destroyers, Alaska’s two U.S. senators said.
The two Republican senators, Dan Sullivan and Lisa Murkowski, issued a joint news release Saturday night saying they had been briefed about the operation.
“We have been in close contact with leadership from Alaska Command for several days now and received detailed classified briefings about the foreign vessels,” Murkowski said.
The Biden administration has been endlessly provoking the Russians and the Chinese, and this has just driven them into each other’s arms.
Before I end this article, I should also mention the North Koreans as well, because they just threatened to “annihilate” us before the end of this century…
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry this week vowed that the country would “annihilate” the United States, adding that the U.S. would be terminated this century.
“Should the U.S. choose to offend our Republic, we will annihilate them by using all our military power that we have gathered so far,” the North Korean diplomats said in a statement Thursday, the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice.
“The Korean War in the last century marked the beginning of the downfall of the U.S. Now, the 21st century would see the irrevocable termination of the U.S. The rulers of the U.S. are well advised to forget, on no account, the lessons of history.”
We are certainly living during a time of “wars and rumors of wars”, and I am entirely convinced that 2024 is going to be such an important turning point.
If the American people truly understood the horrors that the coming wars will cause, there would be millions of people protesting in the streets right now.
But they don’t. Most of us just assume that our leaders know exactly what they are doing and have everything under control. Unfortunately, the exact opposite is actually true.
We are steamrolling toward global conflict, and most global leaders do not even seem interested in talking about peace at this stage.
So the unthinkable is rapidly approaching, and most people will be absolutely blindsided by the nightmarish events that are about to unfold on our planet.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
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.