We are getting dangerously close to the “hot phase” of World War III, but most people in the western world don’t even realize what is going on.
They simply trust our leaders when they tell us that we will never have to be directly involved in a conflict with Russia, but meanwhile those same leaders continue to push us ever closer to such a scenario.
Yesterday, we learned that the UK has now delivered long-range “Storm Shadow” cruise missiles to Ukraine…
The United Kingdom has delivered multiple “Storm Shadow” cruise missiles to Ukraine, giving the nation a new long-range strike capability in advance of a highly anticipated counteroffensive against Russian forces, multiple senior Western officials told CNN.
UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, calling the donation Ukraine’s “best chance to defend themselves against Russia’s continued brutality,” confirmed the transaction on Thursday after CNN exclusively reported the deal.
These missiles do not have enough range to get to Moscow, but they do have the potential to hit strategic targets very deep inside Russian territory.
According to CNN, the UK government “has received assurances from the Ukrainian government that these missiles will be used only within Ukrainian sovereign territory”…
The Storm Shadow is a long-range cruise missile with stealth capabilities, jointly developed by the UK and France, which is typically launched from the air. With a firing range in excess of 250km, or 155 miles, it is just short of the 185-mile range capability of the US-made surface-to-surface Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, that Ukraine has long asked for.
Critically, the Storm Shadow has the range to strike deep into Russian-held territory in Eastern Ukraine. A Western official told CNN that the UK has received assurances from the Ukrainian government that these missiles will be used only within Ukrainian sovereign territory and not inside Russia. UK officials have made frequent public statements identifying Crimea as Ukrainian sovereign territory, describing it as “illegally annexed.”
Of course the Ukrainians consider Crimea to be their “sovereign territory”, and the Russians also consider Crimea to be their “sovereign territory”.
And many experts are already anticipating that the Ukrainians will use these new missiles to strike Russia’s Black Sea fleet which is stationed in Crimea. Here is just one example…
Ben Hodges, a former U.S. Army Europe Commanding General, tweeted: “Well done UK!”
He added: “This will give Ukraine capability to make Crimea untenable for Russian forces,” and would force a Russian rethink of where to position its Black Sea fleet.
If the Ukrainians start raining down cruise missiles on the naval base in Sevastopol, that might be enough to provoke Russia into using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainian targets.
And if the Russians start using their tactical nukes, the Biden administration has already strongly hinted that we are likely to use ours against Russian military assets.
Once we get to that stage, there will be no turning back.
For now, the Ukrainians continue to insist that they are on the verge of launching a very powerful “counteroffensive” which will turn the tide of the war…
Zelenskyy said in an interview broadcast Thursday by the BBC that it would be “unacceptable” to launch the assault now because too many lives would be lost.
“With (what we have) we can go forward and be successful,” Zelenskyy said in the interview, according to the BBC. “But we’d lose a lot of people. I think that’s unacceptable.”
Has the Ukrainian government been able to scrape together enough foreign mercenaries to make a new “counteroffensive” possible?
I am skeptical, but the weeks ahead will show us whether they are bluffing or not.
Meanwhile, it appears that we could be on the verge of witnessing a major conflict erupt in the Middle East.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Islamic Jihad has fired more than 800 rockets into Israel, and the Israeli military has conducted more than 190 airstrikes in Gaza in response…
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad had fired 803 rockets into Israel between Wednesday morning and 8 p.m. on Thursday evening, and the IDF had undertaken 191 airstrikes in Gaza in the same timeframe.
The IDF killed Islamic Jihad rocket commander Ali Ghali around 1:00 a.m. early Thursday, and his deputy, Ahmed Abu Daka, around 4:30 p.m. on Thursday.
This is a huge test for the Netanyahu government.
If the IDF response to these attacks is deemed too weak, Netanyahu will lose a lot of public support.
But if the IDF response is too strong, a major regional war could potentially be sparked.
At this moment, the Israelis are promising that “the campaign will continue as long as necessary”…
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant stated that “the campaign will continue as long as necessary,” after a sitatuation assessment following the rocket strike on Rehovot that killed one man and wounded 10 people.
They further instructed the security forces to “continue to exact a heavy price from the Islamic Jihad for its aggression against the citizens of Israel,” the Prime Minister’s office announced.
Let us hope that a ceasefire can be brokered quickly.
Because if the Israelis send troops into Gaza, everything will change.
Before I end this article, there is one more thing that I wanted to mention.
As we draw closer to a war with China, some leaders in Washington are suggesting that we should actually blow up the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company after an invasion happens in order to keep it from falling into Chinese hands…
Taiwan’s defense minister in statements early this week pushed back against the idea of the US bombing the island’s semiconductor factories in the event of a Chinese invasion.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) recently said the US should “make it very clear to the Chinese that if you invade Taiwan, we’re going to blow up TSMC,” referring to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which produces the majority of the world’s advanced semiconductors.
When asked about Moutlon’s comments, Taiwanese Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng said the military wouldn’t let that happen.
This just shows how dramatically our relationship with China has deteriorated.
At one time, it would have been unthinkable for a member of Congress to say such a thing.
But now many of our politicians are openly acknowledging that war with China is coming sooner or later.
So let me try to summarize what we are facing.
We are already involved in a proxy war with Russia which could soon turn into a shooting war, a major regional conflict in the Middle East could erupt at any moment, and our politicians are publicly talking about a coming war with China.
Yeah, I think that we are definitely in a time of “wars and rumors of wars”, but most of us in the western world are still completely and utterly clueless.
Most people that live in the western world still believe that our leaders are competent and that they have everything under control. Unfortunately, by the time they realize the truth it will be far too late to reverse course.
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.
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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.
This will turn out to be both a long range and short range PROBLEM for the USA, of course.