(The Economic Collapse Blog)—What do think Iran is going to do once we start bombing their nuclear facilities? They know that it is coming, and they have been preparing to respond. When Iranian missiles are raining down on Israeli targets and U.S. military bases throughout the Middle East, there will be no turning back. We will officially be at war with Iran. Needless to say, a war with Iran would be far different from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Iranians have the 8th largest military on the entire planet, and they are armed to the teeth with highly advanced missiles. It would take a “shock and awe” campaign that is unlike anything we have ever seen before to subdue Iran, and full-blown regime change would probably require an invasion.
Most people simply do not realize how close we are to an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East. On Friday, President Trump revealed that he has issued a very chilling ultimatum to the Iranians…
President Donald Trump on Friday revealed that he has sent a letter to Iran warning that it can either “make a deal” with Washington, D.C., on its nuclear program or face the U.S. “militarily.”
“I said, I hope you’re going to negotiate, because it’s going to be a lot better for Iran,” Trump told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo on “Mornings with Maria,” in reference to a letter he sent to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“There are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal,” he said. “I would prefer to make a deal, because I’m not looking to hurt Iran.”
Subsequently, President Trump informed reporters that were gathered in the Oval Office that “something’s going to happen” with Iran “very, very soon”…
US President Donald Trump said on Friday that something related to Iran is “going to happen very soon”.
“We have a situation with Iran that something’s going to happen very soon, very, very soon. You’ll be talking about that pretty soon, I guess,” Trump told reporters at the Oval Office.
“And hopefully we can have a peace deal,” he added. “You know, I’m not speaking out of strength or weakness. I’m just saying I’d rather see a peace deal than the other [option], but the other will solve the problem.”
I know that President Trump would prefer to make a peace deal with the Iranians.
But the Iranians are already ruling out any sort of a deal…
The letter appeared to have been addressed to Iran’s supreme leader, the 85-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has recently opposed negotiations with the US so long as economic sanctions are in force.
The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, responded by saying: “We will not enter any direct negotiations with the US so long as they continue their maximum pressure policy and their threats.”
And there are rumors on social media that the Iranians are threatening to destroy all U.S. bases in the region if they get attacked…
Iran has issued a final warning to the US and Israel through Saudi Arabia.
An attack on Iran is tantamount to the destruction of all US bases in the region and the destruction of all Israeli nuclear facilities.
This is a crisis that should have been dealt with during the Biden administration.
At this point, the Iranian nuclear program has advanced to a very alarming stage…
Rafael Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency director, told the IAEA board this week that Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% had reached 275kg. He said: “Iran is the only country that enriches uranium to this level without having nuclear weapons.”
That quote stunned me.
Nobody can deny what the Iranians are attempting to do.
If they stay on the path that they are on, it won’t be too long before they are able to produce multiple nuclear weapons…
The U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has repeatedly warned in recent months that Iran is pushing forward in its development of near-nuclear-grade uranium and now possesses enough uranium, if further enriched, to develop five nuclear weapons.
President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both repeatedly stated that Iran will never be allowed to produce a nuclear weapon.
And since Iran is not willing to make a deal with Trump, it is only a matter of time before the bombing of Iran begins.
Needless to say, all hell will break loose once that happens.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is no longer providing intelligence to Ukraine, and President Trump has suspended all shipments of military aid in an attempt to force the Ukrainians to the negotiating table. When he was asked about this during an interview that aired on Sunday, he suggested that Ukraine “may not survive anyway”…
President Trump suggested that Ukraine might not be able to survive against Russia even if the US forged ahead with full-blown support for its fight.
Trump’s remarks came while defending his decision to draw down support to Ukraine in the face of Polish President Andrzej Duda’s and others’ concerns that Europe lacks the might to prop up Kyiv without the US.
“Well, it may not survive anyway,” Trump told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in an interview that aired Sunday.
The Russians already had the upper hand, and now their troops are surging forward.
On Friday, it was being reported that three-quarters of the Ukrainian force in Kursk is “almost entirely surrounded”…
The fuse has been burning slowly, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s risky August invasion of Russia’s Kursk region is about to blow up in his face in spectacular fashion — as thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are suddenly in imminent peril of being encircled, according to open source intelligence analysts. The crisis comes as Zelensky is under increasing US pressure to reach a negotiated end to the war — and a loss of captured Russian territory promises to make his already-deteriorated bargaining position even weaker.
According to DeepStateMAP.live, an interactive map of the war run by Ukrainian military bloggers, their country’s forces in Kursk are nearly cleaved into two, with roughly three-quarters of Ukraine’s forces in Russia almost entirely surrounded on Friday. Their last connection between the two forces was a kilometer long and under 500 meters wide at its thinnest section.
It isn’t just Ukrainian soldiers that are in danger of being cut off in Kursk.
There are apparently lots of western mercenaries there too, and at this moment they are being pounded into oblivion.
On Sunday, the Russians captured several more settlements…
Russia’s defense ministry on Sunday said troops took back the settlements of Malaya Loknya, Cherkasskoye Porechnoye and Kositsa from Ukrainian forces.
“The lid of the smoking caldron is practically closed,” Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president who is now the deputy chairman of the country’s Security Council, said on Sunday of Russian advances in Kursk. “The offensive continues. Carry on!”
Ukrainian and Russian military bloggers warn Kyiv’s hold on the region is more tenuous than ever, with Russian troops backed by North Korean forces launching incessant attacks.
Once the Russians have cleared out Kursk, they may use it as a launching pad to initiate an offensive in the direction of Kyiv.
So we will want to watch this area of the front very closely.
The Ukrainians have been caught off guard by how aggressive the Russians have been in recent days. In one operation, Russian special forces actually “walked inside a gas pipeline to strike Ukrainian units from the rear”…
Russian special forces walked inside a gas pipeline to strike Ukrainian units from the rear in the Kursk region, Ukraine’s military and Russian war bloggers reported, as Moscow claimed fresh gains in its push to recapture parts of the border province that Kyiv seized in a shock offensive.
Many of our European allies are very frustrated with President Trump’s efforts to force Ukraine to the negotiating table because those efforts are hurting the Ukrainians on the battlefield.
But the truth is that President Trump is also trying to force Russia to the negotiating table…
I do not believe that threatening Russia is the correct approach.
In fact, I believe that if President Trump continues to threaten Russia it will backfire severely.
We have entered such a dangerous chapter of human history. As Steve Bannon has astutely observed, we are “already deep into the kinetic part of the third World War”…
Bannon went on to explain that the casualties amassed in the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts have already exceeded the total deaths in the first phase of World War II, including the invasion of Poland, the fall of France and the Blitz over England.
“The world’s on the brink. We’re already deep into the kinetic part of the third World War,” Bannon asserted.
I really wish that more people understood this.
Bannon says that some portions of Ukraine “look like Dresden in 1945”, and he is 100 percent correct about that…
“Parts of Ukraine look like Dresden in 1945. You’re in a kinetic war right now that’s every bit as dangerous and every bit as brutal, if not more brutal, than the opening phase of World War 2,” he added.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians are already dead.
More than a million Ukrainians are already dead.
In the Middle East, we have already seen a tremendous amount of death and destruction, and now a final showdown with Iran is looming.
What will it take for people to finally wake up?
World War 3 is here, and once the bombing of Iran begins that will ramp things up to an entirely new level.
Michael’s blockbuster 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.