(DCNF)—The U.S. strike against Iran on Saturday night has ignited fears that Iran may choose to orchestrate attacks against Americans with undercover agents.
Iran threatened to activate sleeper cells in the U.S. days before President Donald Trump decided to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities Saturday night, two U.S. officials told NBC News. In the wake of the U.S. attacks against the Iranian nuclear program, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a memo Sunday warning of a “heightened threat environment” in light of the attacks, warning that Iranian government affiliates could launch terrorist attacks.
“The likelihood of violent extremists in the Homeland independently mobilizing to violence in response to the conflict would likely increase if Iranian leadership issued a religious ruling calling for retaliatory violence against targets in the Homeland,” the memo read. “Multiple recent Homeland terrorist attacks have been motivated by anti-Semitic or anti-Israel sentiment, and the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict could contribute to U.S.-based individuals plotting additional attacks.”
Trump announced a ceasefire agreement on Truth Social Monday evening between Iran and Israel, set to go into effect at approximately 12:00 a.m. EST, which would mark an end to the ongoing twelve day conflict assuming it holds. While Iran may have indicated it is no longer interested in continuing the war in the short-term with the agreement, the regime has a considerable history of pursuing violent plots on American soil.
In 2011, two men linked to the Iranian government were charged in a plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador on American soil. One co-conspirator, Gholam Shakuri, was involved in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Qods Force, a key cog of Tehran’s state-sponsored terror machine.
More recently in 2024, suspected Iranian asset Farhad Shakeri was arrested in connection to an alleged plot to surveil and murder an Iranian dissident with U.S. citizenship, as well as potentially targeting Trump himself. The attack was allegedly intended to be revenge for Trump’s decision to eliminate IRGC Qods Force Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020.
An Iranian Intelligence operative, Majid Dastjani Farahani, was suspected by law enforcement officials of trying to target key former Trump administration officials in March 2024, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Iranian novelist Salman Rushdie, the author of a book that some Islamic religious authorities found blasphemous and the subject of an Iranian fatwa, was stabbed in 2022 by a man with ties to Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy.
Simone Ledeen, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Iranian networks are a cause for major concern given their history of activity in the U.S., especially after the strikes that hammered Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend.
“I think there is a real threat and it should be taken seriously,” Ledeen told the DCNF. “We have U.S. citizens and U.S. military, those are all potential targets for these sleeper cells. But I would also take a step back and look at the attempted murders that the Iranian regime has undertaken in the last decade or so.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu has claimed that Iran attempted to assassinate Trump twice, but did not elaborate on the incidents to which he was referring. Trump said in February that he left “instructions” if he is assassinated by Iran, and that there would be “nothing left” of the Islamic Republic in the event that Tehran orchestrates his assassination, according to The Associated Press.
Lax border enforcement under former President Joe Biden allowed hundreds of Iranian nationals to enter the U.S. without much or any vetting, raising concerns that individuals on missions from Tehran could still be present in the U.S. The Biden administration apprehended 1,504 Iranian nationals at the southern border, releasing 729 into the U.S. between fiscal years 2021 to 2024.
“I’m sure the FBI is all over it, but they can’t always be everywhere, so people should feel alert,” Ledeen told the DCNF.
The U.S. dropped a number of bunker buster bombs on three Iranian nuclear sites in a daring attack on Saturday night, with initial damage assessments reportedly showing considerable damage to the Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan sites in central Iran. In response, Tehran has considered blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping vein for the global oil supply.
Iran also launched a missile attack against a U.S. air base in Qatar Monday, with no rockets landing on target or any casualties reported. Trump noted in a Monday post to Truth Social that the Iranian regime effectively notified Washington of the attacks in advance.
Trump is hopeful that the Iranians will pursue peace after the ineffectual strike, saying in the same Monday Truth Social Post that he would “enthusiastically” encourage peace between Iran and Israel.
The Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs could not be reached for comment.
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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.