As the United States and Israel execute the largest American military operation in the region in a generation, the United Nations Security Council scrambles not to confront decades of Iranian terror, but to condemn the countries that finally acted against it.
While smoke was still rising over Tehran and U.S. President Donald Trump was confirming the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the United Nations was doing what it does best: rushing to the defense of an Islamist regime that has spent four decades financing terrorism, murdering dissidents, arming proxies from Gaza to Yemen, and racing toward a nuclear weapons capability.
By Saturday afternoon, the Security Council had called an emergency session, the Secretary General had issued a formal condemnation, and America’s diplomatic adversaries were already competing to sound the most outraged. The performance was entirely predictable. What’s worth examining carefully is exactly what the United Nations chose to condemn — and what it chose to ignore.
Operation Epic Fury, launched in the early morning hours of Saturday, February 28, represents what U.S. Central Command described as the “largest regional concentration of American military firepower in a generation.” Strikes began at 1:15 a.m. Eastern Time, targeting what CENTCOM identified as Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command and control facilities, Iranian air defense capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and military airfields. The operation was carried out jointly with Israeli forces. CENTCOM confirmed zero American casualties as a result of retaliatory Iranian strikes — a remarkable result by any military standard.
President Trump confirmed the death of Supreme Leader Khamenei in a post on Truth Social, calling him “one of the most evil people in History.” The statement was blunt, as Trump’s tend to be, but the factual case behind it is not exactly disputed. Khamenei presided over the execution of political prisoners, the funding of Hamas and Hezbollah, the suppression of the 2019 protests in which Iranian security forces killed hundreds of their own citizens, and the sustained pursuit of nuclear weapons in direct defiance of international demands. Trump also issued a direct message to Iran’s military and security forces: “Now they can have Immunity, later they only get Death,” urging IRGC members to stand down and allow Iranian patriots to reclaim their country.
The United Nations Security Council meeting, scheduled for approximately 4 p.m. Saturday and chaired by the United Kingdom, was called at the joint request of Communist China and Russia. Their formal request described the strikes as an “unprovoked act of armed aggression.” That framing requires a certain willingness to treat the last forty years of Iranian foreign policy as though it never happened — the proxy wars, the terror financing, the missile attacks on American troops in Iraq and Syria, the assassination plots on American soil, the October 7 attack on Israel that Iran’s proxies carried out with weapons Iran supplied. China and Russia know all of this. The “unprovoked” framing is not an error. It is a choice.
United Nations Secretary General António Guterres wasted little time issuing a formal condemnation. “I condemn today’s military escalation in the Middle East,” he wrote on social media. “The use of force by the United States [and] Israel against Iran, and the subsequent retaliation by Iran across the region, undermine international peace and security.”
He went on to cite the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force against the territorial integrity of any state, calling for an immediate ceasefire and a return to “the negotiating table.” Guterres, a former Socialist Party Prime Minister of Portugal, has condemned Israel repeatedly over the past two years while characterizing Hamas attacks with considerably more rhetorical nuance. His record on the subject leaves little ambiguity about where his instincts lie.
U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk added his voice, declaring that he “deplores” the strikes. “Bombs and missiles are not the way to resolve differences,” Türk said, “but only result in death, destruction and human misery.” The observation sounds principled in isolation. Applied to the specific context — an Islamist regime actively developing nuclear weapons while continuing to arm and fund multiple terror organizations — it reads more like a preference for indefinite inaction dressed up as moral clarity. The unspoken assumption in statements like Türk’s is that the status quo is stable and sustainable. Events on the ground suggest otherwise.
French President Emmanuel Macron called for an “urgent” Security Council meeting, a position echoed by the governments of China and Russia. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, alongside Macron and British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, urged Iran to “refrain from indiscriminate military strikes.”
Starmer’s posture was notably more measured than his European counterparts. While confirming that British forces are not participating in Operation Epic Fury, Starmer acknowledged that British planes are “in the sky” over the Middle East as part of a defensive operation.
More notably, he placed the burden of resolution squarely on Tehran: “Iran can end this now. They should refrain from further strikes, give up their weapons programme and cease the appalling violence and oppression of the Iranian people — who deserve the right to determine their own future.”
That line is worth pausing on, because it points toward a fault line running through Western responses to the operation. Some leaders — including Starmer — have been willing, however quietly, to acknowledge that the core problem is Iranian behavior, not American or Israeli action. Others have defaulted immediately to procedural objections about international law, treating the U.S.-Israeli strikes as the primary transgression while Iran’s decades-long record functions only as background noise. The distinction matters, because it determines whether the international response will amount to anything useful or will simply produce more communiqués that Iran ignores.
Notably absent from the chorus of condemnations were Australia and Canada. Both governments — led by left-of-center administrations that have not always seen eye to eye with President Trump — issued statements of support for the operation, specifically citing the goal of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and halting the regime’s support for terrorist proxies across the region.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese backing a Trump military operation is not a small thing. It suggests that even among governments ideologically inclined toward multilateralism and diplomatic caution, there is a recognition that the Iranian nuclear program represents a genuine and immediate threat — one that negotiations, sanctions, and Security Council resolutions have spectacularly failed to address over the course of more than two decades.
Saudi Arabia’s response added another dimension. The kingdom strongly condemned Iranian missile attacks on Gulf nations that followed the opening U.S. and Israeli strikes — a reminder that Iran’s retaliatory aggression was not confined to Israel or American forces. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also moved to block the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which roughly 20 percent of global oil supply transits.
The economic implications of that action extend well beyond the Middle East, and they will be felt quickly. The IRGC’s decision to weaponize global energy infrastructure as a retaliatory tool is itself an argument for the operation’s necessity — though don’t expect that framing to appear prominently in U.N. proceedings.
Iran’s ballistic missile strikes reached Tel Aviv. A woman in her 40s was killed, and at least 20 others were injured, according to Magen David Adom. The international airport in Dubai suffered minor damage, with four staff members injured. These are the costs of Iranian retaliation — real people, real casualties — and they will receive a fraction of the attention that the Security Council will devote to condemning the United States.
What the emergency Security Council session will actually accomplish is the easier question to answer: very little. The United States holds veto power in the Security Council, and any binding resolution directed against American military action will be stopped there. Russia and China know this. Their request for an emergency meeting is therefore not a genuine attempt to resolve the conflict through international mechanisms — it is political theater designed to position themselves as defenders of international order while simultaneously arming and supporting the regime under attack. The performance has its own logic, but it should be received with eyes open.
There is a deeper issue here that the Security Council proceedings will not address and that most media coverage will dance around: the United Nations, as currently constituted, has no functional mechanism for stopping a nuclear-armed or near-nuclear Islamist theocracy that is actively destabilizing an entire region. The organization was not designed for this problem, and its principal members have conflicting interests that make collective action impossible.
Decades of failed diplomatic efforts — the JCPOA, the P5+1 negotiations, the endless rounds of IAEA inspections and Iranian stonewalling — have not produced a nuclear-free Iran. They have produced a nuclear-threshold Iran with an increasingly advanced ballistic missile program and a network of armed proxies stretching from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq.
The question of whether military force was the right response to that reality is a serious one, and reasonable people can analyze it seriously. But that analysis requires engaging with the actual problem — not retreating to procedural language about the U.N. Charter while treating forty years of Iranian aggression as an afterthought. Secretary General Guterres’ statement condemns the American and Israeli use of force and the “subsequent retaliation by Iran” in the same breath, as though the two are morally equivalent events arising from a neutral starting point. They are not. One is a military operation aimed at dismantling a regime’s weapons infrastructure. The other is decades of state-sponsored terror, culminating in an active bid for nuclear weapons, that finally triggered a response.
President Trump, for his part, appears to have calculated that the window to act before Iran achieves a genuine nuclear capability was closing. Whether that assessment is correct, and whether Operation Epic Fury achieves its stated objectives of disabling Iran’s missile program and creating conditions for regime change, will be determined in the days and weeks ahead.
What is already clear is that the international institutions designed to manage crises like this one are not managing it — they are reacting to it, and in doing so, they are primarily concerned with constraining the parties who acted rather than addressing the conditions that made action, in the minds of those who ordered it, necessary.
The Iranian people, as both Trump and Starmer noted in similar language, deserve the right to determine their own future. That future, if the operation succeeds, will not be decided in a United Nations chamber in New York. It will be decided in Iran. The Security Council meeting on Saturday afternoon will produce statements. Whether it produces anything else — any honest reckoning with how the world arrived at this moment — is a different question, and based on the institution’s track record, the answer is already fairly apparent.
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.