(End of the American Dream)—Targeting military assets isn’t going to wreck the global economy, but targeting key infrastructure could. The damage that has already been done to oil and natural gas infrastructure in the Middle East is going to take years to fully repair and rebuild. But so far the damage that has been done has been somewhat limited. If both sides decide to start conducting all-out attacks on oil and gas infrastructure, the world would be facing an unprecedented energy crisis with no end in sight. Unfortunately, it appears that such a scenario could potentially be ahead of us.
A couple of days ago, President Trump told Fox News that the U.S. military would keep hitting Iran really hard for the next several nights…
“We’re going to hit them very hard tonight. We’re going to hit them very hard tomorrow night. We’re going to hit them very hard the night after… We’re going to knock out all their power plants, we’re going to knock out all their bridges, unless they get to the table and negotiate.”
Of course that is precisely what we have witnessed.
There has been bombing night after night, and tonight the attacks have continued.
Just a little while ago, U.S. Central Command announced that strikes were occurring inside Iran for a 6th night in a row…
Bandar Abbas has been hit repeatedly in recent days, and tonight “loud explosions” were heard in the city…
Loud explosions were heard in Bandar Abbas, in southern Iran along the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian state TV.
Just minutes earlier, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had wrapped up a briefing in which she was asked about the war with Iran.
“The president is not going to allow them to fire on the ships in the strait,” she said. “The president has proved not just to Iran that we can hit them anytime, anywhere, any place.
When the ceasefire collapsed, the U.S. primarily focused on hitting military targets.
But now that has changed.
Key infrastructure is being targeted, and that includes a very important bridge that links Bandar Abbas and Shiraz…
Among the sites hit was the Bandar Abbas-Kahurestan-Lar bridge, a key road link between Bandar Abbas and Shiraz, as well as Iranshahr Airport in southeastern Iran, according to Iranian state media reports cited by Iran International.
Destroying this bridge was a very big move.
Without that bridge, Iran’s largest commercial port will be largely cut off from the rest of Iran…
Of course there are still ways to get to Bandar Abbas from other areas of Iran.
But that bridge was on the main highway that most commercial trucks used.
This is just going to make the Iranians even angrier.
Prior to the attacks tonight, the Iranians warned that if their infrastructure got targeted they would start destroying infrastructure all over the region…
In a statement published on Telegram on Thursday morning, a spokesperson for Iran’s top military command said that if Trump’s threats were implemented “everything that is still intact … that is, all the infrastructure in the region – will be crushed under the steel blows of the powerful armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran; so that no trace of them remains and it is as if they never existed in the first place.”
They added that “under no circumstances and in no way will we allow America, as a foreign and extra-regional country, to interfere in the Strait of Hormuz.”
“This is Iran’s invincible red line,” the spokesperson said.
Those are very strong words.
Will the Iranians now follow through on their threats?
It is also being reported that the Houthis are preparing to completely close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait…
Needless to say, this would change everything.
The Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Strait of Hormuz have never been closed simultaneously.
Saudi Arabia has dealt with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by shipping most of the oil that it produces out of the Red Sea port of Yanbu…
Saudi Arabia has diverted 70 percent of its energy exports through its Red Sea port of Yanbu, Reuters reported, and so any attacks there further hurt oil markets.
If the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Strait of Hormuz are both not usable, all of a sudden the flow of Saudi oil will be choked off.
Saudi Arabia could respond by declaring war on the Houthis, but the Houthis have already warned that they will bombard Saudi oil facilities with missiles if that happens…
That is nuts.
We really are on the verge of the unthinkable.
How far up the escalation ladder are the parties involved in this conflict willing to go?
I guess we shall have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” has put a 10 million dollar bounty on President Trump…
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq announced Thursday night that it was offering a $10 million reward for the killing of US President Donald Trump, Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency and Russia’s state-run RT, formerly Russia Today, reported.
The group said the reward followed what it described as Trump’s “audacious and offensive statements” against commanders killed while fighting ISIS.
Conservative activist Laura Loomer said Russian state media was “promoting the Iraqi Islamic Resistance’s $10 million bounty for the assassination of President Trump,” adding: “Every day, Russia proves more and more why they aren’t an ally.”
At this point, just about every terrorist in the Middle East would like to get Trump.
Hopefully he is being extra cautious these days.
Lastly, I wanted to mention a military conflict that the U.S. is currently involved in that hardly anyone is talking about.
As Leo Hohmann has aptly pointed out, the U.S. military has been conducting dozens of airstrikes in Somalia and the mainstream media is almost completely silent about this…
The July 13 U.S. airstrike marked at least the 74th U.S. airstrike in Somalia this year, according to AFRICOM’s numbers, putting the command on track to break its annual record, which it set at 124 in 2025. Besides the bombing campaign against al-Shabaab, the U.S. has also been launching airstrikes against an ISIS affiliate in Somalia’s northeast Puntland region.
We really are living at a time of wars and rumors of wars.
More than half of the nations on the entire planet are either directly engaged in military conflict or are directly funding military conflict.
I believe that we are going to witness some absolutely shocking escalations in the days ahead.
And once those absolutely shocking escalations occur, it will be impossible to turn back the clock.
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.