(End of the American Dream)—If Iran is not bluffing, this war could be about to take a very apocalyptic turn. The Iranians keep dropping hints that they possess very powerful weapons that they will soon use against the United States and Israel. But why should we believe them when they have such a long history of lying? As I pointed out in my last article, the Iranians have lied to us over and over again. So it is entirely possible that they are bluffing in a desperate attempt to get us to back off. I cannot blame anyone that is convinced that is what is happening here.
But what if they are actually telling us the truth this time?
Going all the way back to the 1990s, there have been reports that Iran has either acquired or has attempted to acquire certain types of weapons.
This is something that I have written about many times.
Obviously the Iranians have not used any unconventional weapons since this new war started, but a spokesperson for Iran’s Defense Ministry is claiming that they simply “do not intend to deploy all our advanced weapons and equipment in the first days”…
Iran is ready for a long war against the United States and Israel and has so far not used its most advanced weapons, its Defense Ministry says.
“We have the capacity to resist and to continue an offensive defense longer than what [the enemy] has planned for this imposed war,” ministry spokesman Reza Talaei-Nik is quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.
“We do not intend to deploy all our advanced weapons and equipment in the first days,” he adds.
This implies that they are holding back.
So exactly what are they holding back?
It could be nothing.
This could be a total bluff.
Or it could be something else.
The IRGC is warning that the “gates of hell will open more and more” as this conflict progresses…
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warned Tuesday that the “gates of hell will open more and more” on the United States and Israel, as Iranian forces launched fresh attacks on Israeli territory and a U.S. military base in Qatar.
Tehran also warned European nations that joining the conflict would constitute an “act of war.”
It is entirely possible that this is big talk from a defeated foe.
But they seem so confident.
One regime official reportedly told the Financial Times that we will soon witness “further escalation”…
The Iranian military is being destroyed, and Iran is rapidly running through their supplies of ballistic missiles. So how could they possibly “escalate” matters?
To me, the only possible way that Iran will be able to achieve “further escalation” is to use unconventional weapons.
Personally, it would not shock me at all if the Iranians decided to use chemical or biological weapons.
But could they also possess weapons that are even more deadly?
Steve Witkoff is claiming that Iranian negotiators were actually bragging about how advanced their nuclear program had become…
US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, meanwhile, revealed that Iranian negotiators boasted “to us directly, with no shame,” in talks earlier this year, that they had evaded international safeguards to enrich enough uranium so as “to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.”
Apparently the negotiations that occurred just before the war started did not go well at all.
The Iranians felt that they had an “inalienable right” to keep moving their nuclear program forward, and U.S. officials felt that they had an “inalienable right” to stop them…
Still, Witkoff said the Iranian negotiators “were proud that they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.”
He said that during that first meeting, the Iranian negotiators insisted on “an inalienable right” to enrich their nuclear fuel.
“We responded that the president feels we have the inalienable right to stop you dead in your tracks,” Witkoff recalled. “Jared and I just sort of looked at ourselves flummoxed, and said, ‘We’re really in for it now.’”
Wow.
That is crazy.
I guess all of the talk about how the negotiations were making “progress” was just a bunch of nonsense.
Earlier today, the IDF destroyed a secret nuclear weapons development compound in Iran.
We are being told that Iranian nuclear scientists were using that facility “to develop a key component for nuclear weapons”.
Could the Iranians have something up their sleeves that most western experts were not anticipating? I don’t know.
For now, the Iranians are still limiting themselves to using conventional weapons, and they have been heavily targeting energy infrastructure in nearby countries.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan believes that Iranian leaders are attempting to take the entire region down with them…
Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has accused Iran of pursuing a scorched-earth strategy as it comes under mounting military pressure, warning that Tehran is deliberately targeting energy infrastructure across the Middle East under the logic that if the regime falls, it will take the wider region down with it.
Fidan said Iran has made a calculated assessment that any existential threat to the regime should trigger maximum regional damage. Tehran, he explained, is acutely aware of how critical energy infrastructure in neighboring countries is to the global economy, and is exploiting that vulnerability as a form of leverage.
“Iran is pursuing a strategy of ‘if I go down, I will take the region with me,’ and is targeting energy infrastructure in other countries, particularly critical ones,” Fidan said. The foreign minister added that as military strikes against Iran intensify, Tehran is escalating its attacks on regional energy assets to build pressure against the forces arrayed against it, effectively turning the Gulf’s interconnected oil and gas networks into a weapon of deterrence.
It will be very interesting to see if there is a shift in Iranian strategy now that a new supreme leader has been elected.
We are being told that Ayatollah Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has been selected after intense pressure from the IRGC…
Iran’s new Supreme Leader has been chosen, Iranian media report.
Ali Khamenei’s second eldest son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has been elected by Iran’s Assembly of Experts as the country’s next Supreme Leader, according to Iran International.
Sources told the outlet that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) put pressure on the assembly to appoint a successor after Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli strike on Saturday. Israeli officials were expecting Mojtaba to step into his father’s shoes, according to Israeli outlet Ynetnews.
So now one Khamenei has replaced another, and 125,000 heavily-armed members of the IRGC are still firmly in control of major cities throughout Iran.
What this means is that regime change is still a long way away.
From this point forward, most top Iranian leaders will be hiding under hospitals, schools and mosques.
As a result, it will not be possible to target them from the air.
And there are already lots of reports that the members of the IRGC are attempting to blend into the general population as much as possible.
So how will it be possible to achieve regime change without boots on the ground?
I have no idea.
But if the Iranians choose to use unconventional weapons at some point, the U.S. and Israel will have no choice but to end the current regime.
War can be very unpredictable, and I think that a lot of twists and turns are still ahead of us.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.