(End of the American Dream)—It appears that we could soon witness a very serious escalation in the Middle East. As you will see below, President Trump is strongly considering “full-scale military operations” against Iran that would be “far more intense and extensive” than we have seen over the past couple of weeks.
Since fighting has resumed, the U.S. has primarily been hitting targets in southern Iran along the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. This obviously hasn’t moved the Iranians in the right direction at all. Instead, the Iranians have escalated matters by targeting civilian infrastructure, and now the Bab el-Mandeb Strait has been closed by the Houthis. So now Trump has a decision to make. He could back down and try more diplomacy, or he could take the war against Iran to the next level.
According to Fox News, Trump is expected to make the decision on whether or not “to expand military operations against Iran” soon…
President Donald Trump is expected to decide in the coming days whether to expand military operations against Iran and return to full-scale combat, senior U.S. officials told Fox News on Monday.
The officials stressed that no final decision has been made.
If Trump orders a return to full-scale military operations, the campaign would be “far more intense and extensive” than the nine consecutive nights of U.S. airstrikes that began July 7, which have primarily targeted Iranian military assets linked to operations around the Strait of Hormuz, the officials said.
Preparations for an expanded campaign are already well underway.
In fact, more U.S. aircraft are being deployed to the region in anticipation of Trump’s decision…
According to Fox News Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin, U.S. Central Command, (CENTCOM) would likely increase its military posture by deploying additional fighter aircraft, including F-16s and F-35s, as well as KC-135 aerial refueling tankers, in preparation for any decision by Trump to widen the campaign.
The official also confirmed reports of additional U.S. military aircraft moving into the Middle East, describing the deployments as “preparatory” while military planners await a final decision from Trump.
Of course my readers already knew this.
In a previous article, I discussed the fact that dozens of U.S. refueling aircraft have been making their way to Israel.
If Trump does pull the trigger, the Israelis are ready to go too.
An Israeli defense official just told i24 News that operational plans have been “fully finalized”…
If the U.S. and Israel start bombing the living daylights out of Tehran, that will start a chain of events that could be hard to stop.
For now, the U.S. continues to strike targets across southern Iran.
In fact, U.S. Central Command just announced that bombing has begun for a 10th consecutive night…
It is still early, but explosions have already been reported in Bandar Abbas and on Qeshm Island…
Explosions were audible in the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas and on Qeshm Island, both of which sit on the Strait of Hormuz and have been frequent targets of U.S. strikes, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency said.
Needless to say, the Iranians will retaliate.
During the past couple of nights, they have targeted desalination facilities, and this represents a very serious escalation…
Tens of millions of people in the Gulf rely on desalination for their drinking water. There are an estimated 5,000 desalination plants scattered around the Middle East, and the vast majority of the Gulf’s desalinated water comes from just 56 of these facilities.
In Kuwait, roughly 90 percent of the country’s drinking water comes from desalination plants.
Bahrain—which said one of its desalination plants was struck by Iran in March but not significantly damaged—is similarly dependent on these facilities for its drinking water.
In Qatar, this number surges to 99 percent, meaning desalination plants are critical for keeping its population supplied with drinking water.
The Iranians have also been hitting U.S. military bases quite hard, and CBS News is reporting that close to 100 U.S. service members have been injured in recent days…
Nearly 100 American service members have been injured in multiple Iranian airstrikes on bases in the Middle East region this month, U.S. officials told CBS News.
Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell confirmed the numbers in a statement to CBS News, saying almost 100 people “were deemed to have some degree of injury since July 7, 2026,” 96% of whom have returned to duty.
In addition to those that have been injured, U.S. Central Command has acknowledged that three service members were killed over the weekend.
President Trump is very angry about this, and he is pledging that the Iranians will pay for what they have done “many times over”…
President Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he’s directed military leaders to see that Iran pays for the death of each U.S. soldier “many times over.”
“Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over!” Mr. Trump wrote. “This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military.”
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Iranian missiles “have gotten faster and deadlier”, and everyone is wondering how this suddenly occurred.
Are the Russians or the Chinese helping Iran?
Just a little while ago, Trump threatened to slap 50 percent tariffs on any nation that is “supplying Military Weapons to Iran”…
Trump must be convinced that someone is supplying advanced weapons to Iran in order for him to make such a statement.
What is he not telling us?
It certainly would not be a surprise if the Russians are helping Iran, because we have been guiding hundreds of Ukrainian drones to their targets deep inside Russian territory…
MOSCOW has been blitzed by Ukraine’s biggest attack of the war so far – with dramatic clips showing 400 drones raining hell on Vladimir Putin’s doorstep.
Extraordinary footage showed huge plumes of smoke rising over the Russian capital amid the onslaught – part of Volodymyr Zelensky’s endgame blitz.
A critical oil depot in Podolsk and a key logistics hub called the Yuzhnye Vorota Industrial Park – located near Moscow’s Domodedovo airport – were among the targets.
We should not be helping the Ukrainians to do this, because the Russians consider us to be responsible for these attacks, and that puts us dangerously close to a shooting war with Russia.
If we keep going down the road that we are currently on, we could eventually find ourselves fighting multiple wars simultaneously.
One Iranian official is claiming that his government fully expects the U.S. to conduct a ground invasion of Iran…
Tehran has spent decades preparing for — and welcoming — a U.S. ground invasion, a senior Iranian official has claimed, as fresh explosions rocked the region on the eighth day of renewed U.S.-Iran strikes.
Seyed Mohammad Marandi, an Iranian American academic identified as a regime “mouthpiece,” also boasted that Tehran had just launched a “new missile” while decentralizing and burying its arsenal deep underground to withstand sustained American air campaigns.
“The Americans are planning an invasion. I’m not saying it will necessarily happen. I’m not saying it will necessarily happen in the next few days. But they have plans for an invasion,” Marandi, who served as an advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiation team during recent talks with the U.S. in Pakistan, said in an interview with political analyst Glenn Diesen.
Shockingly, that same official says that the Iranians actually want a ground invasion to happen because they believe that they would emerge victorious…
Marandi concluded by claiming that Tehran views a U.S. ground operation as the most direct path to ending the conflict on its own terms.
“The Iranians — we discussed this during the 40-day war before on your show — when I said that the Iranians actually want the Americans to carry out a land invasion, and the same is true now, because they felt that if there was a land invasion, they would win,” he told Diesen.
The zealots that run Iran do not see the world the same way that westerners see the world.
Their theology actually causes them to look forward to chaos and war.
No matter what happens, they are convinced that they will be victorious in the end and that their version of Islam will conquer the globe.
If they die, they believe that they will be rewarded in the afterlife as martyrs.
If they live, they feel like they have been given the privilege of carrying on the fight.
Now we are locked in a brutal war with these guys, and there is no end in sight.
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.