At any moment, President Donald Trump could decide to directly involve the United States in yet another war in the Middle East—this time against Iran.
The stakes could not be higher and this week, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., joins “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss.
“I think President Trump’s instincts are to try to keep us out of war,” Paul told The Daily Signal. “I think he has these instincts within his belief system of restraint and less intervention.” Nevertheless, Paul warned that there might be “forces within his administration that would like to get us more involved.”
The United States’ support for Israel in the war that broke out on Oct. 7, 2023, has, as of writing, been limited to assisting Israel defend against drone and missile strikes and providing Israel with intelligence, military aid, and weapons sales. At the same time, the United States was pursuing a new nuclear deal with Iran, and news reports suggested American and Iranian negotiators were getting close.
But the war entered a new phase when Israel launched Operation Rising Lion on June 13 in what the Israeli government has described as a preemptive attack on Iranian nuclear capabilities. The U.S. government has insisted this action was taken unilaterally by the Israelis but with some knowledge by the U.S. The extent of that knowledge and American policymakers’ feelings toward it remain unclear.
In the first hours of fighting, however, Israel’s strikes in Operation Rising Lion targeted not only Iran’s nuclear facilities but its nuclear scientists, as well as top military and political officials. “Senior leaders in Iran are already packing their bags,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed in a June 14 video address. “They sense what’s coming.”
“The real question is, ‘How is Iran going to respond to this?’” Paul said.
“This is the difficulty of foreign policy. We can say all the things we want: ‘We don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon,’” Paul explained. Yet he urged that Americans consider “how they will respond to being attacked.”
Iran has “been attacked by Israel—significant attack. Their scientists have been killed and their higher echelon of military leaders have been killed. So do you think they’ll come to the negotiating table or leave?” Paul told The Daily Signal. “I would imagine they are humiliated because they’ve been really, utterly decimated. I mean, Israel’s shown incredible military prowess. They’ve killed people at will. They rule the skies. They’ve knocked out a lot of nuclear capacity—probably not all.”
“What happens if negotiations go by the wayside?” Paul asked rhetorically. “I think that’s what we’re facing right now.”
There are no “easy” and certain answers to that question, Paul suggested. Iran “could say, ‘Well, alright, we hear you … We’re going to submit to your will.’” The other scenario is much more concerning: “Or they might respond by saying, ‘We’re going to commit the final steps to go ahead and have a weapon because the only thing that’ll keep you guys out of our country is to let you know we have a nuclear weapon.’”
The missile salvos between Tel-Aviv and Tehran continue, and America has repositioned military assets from all over the world—the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was brought in from the Indo-Pacific and aerial fuel tankers have flown over from U.S. bases—gearing up for a potential response.
Those advocating for America’s involvement to denuclearize Iran, however, have not answered other questions. Questions such as how far is the U.S. willing to go to deny the Ayatollah the bomb? Regime change?
“Militarily, I think we can defeat Iran probably in a matter of weeks,” Paul said. “It’s what comes afterwards” that gives him pause.
“The unintended consequences in Afghanistan took 20 years,” he noted. “When we finally left, it reverted back to the stone ages within six months. We wasted a trillion dollars there. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t have gone after our enemies there. We should have, but we should have come home three months later.”
“Just the whole nation-building enterprise in Afghanistan was a huge mistake,” Paul explained. “In Iraq, we take out the main opposition to Iran. So by anybody’s estimate, Iran is more of a problem, regionally, because Saddam Hussein is gone.”
The question every American policymaker needs to ask themselves right now, Paul said, is, “What are the unintended consequences of this? Do they rush to the bomb?”
Paul’s hope is that the president ”will resist the calls of people wanting to bomb Tehran,” and get everyone back to the negotiating table. “Donald Trump, while I don’t think he’s a libertarian—although he tells me all the time ‘I’m more libertarian than you are,’ I don’t believe that’s probably true, Mr. President—but he does have some libertarian instincts.”
“My hope is still that there’s a route for diplomacy,” Paul told The Daily Signal. Such an agreement, he said, “has to be not just about nuclear weapons, it needs to be about ballistic weapons and … quit committing war and proxy wars throughout the Middle East.”
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.