(End of the American Dream)—We are locked in a steel cage with Iran and nobody can seem to find the key. But if we don’t find a way out, the global economy is going to collapse, global food production is going to decline precipitously, and it is likely just a matter of time before someone uses weapons that should never be used under any circumstances. President Trump sent Iran a 15 point plan to end the war this week, but the Iranians just laughed at it. The Iranians have no intention of ending this war until “its own conditions are met”…
Iran has rejected a US proposal to end the war and set out conditions for any ceasefire, Press TV reported on Wednesday, citing a senior official.
“Iran will end the war when it decides to do so and when its own conditions are met,” the official said, adding: “No negotiations will be held prior to that.”
“Iran’s defensive operations will continue until its conditions are met,” the official said, describing the US proposal as “excessive.”
So what do the Iranians want?
They are asking for five things to happen before they will even begin negotiating…
- A complete halt to “aggression and assassinations” by the enemy.
- The establishment of concrete mechanisms to ensure that the war is not reimposed on the Islamic Republic.
- Guaranteed and clearly defined payment of war damages and reparations.
- The conclusion of the war across all fronts and for all resistance groups involved throughout the region.
- Iran’s exercise of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz is and will remain Iran’s natural and legal right, and it constitutes a guarantee for the implementation of the other party’s commitments, and must be recognized.
The U.S. and Israel will never pay for the damage that they have done inside Iran.
And Israel will certainly not stop fighting against Hezbollah.
But that last one is the kicker. There is no way that the Trump administration will ever agree to Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.
So there will be no negotiated settlement no matter how much the Trump administration may want one.
One Iranian spokesperson is mocking us by suggesting that U.S. officials are simply negotiating with themselves…
The Iranians are eagerly anticipating the appearance of the Mahdi, because he is supposed to come during a time of great chaos and war.
So why would they surrender if they think that the Mahdi is about to show up?
To them, that wouldn’t make any sense at all.
They are trapped in this war by their own ideology.
They are absolutely convinced that they are going to win, and they have just released a video that depicts the Statue of Liberty being blown up by an Iranian missile…
A crazy Iranian AI-generated video shows a missile blowing up the Statue of Liberty — and also references the Epstein scandal and lefty anti-war talking points
The minute-long clip, which ends with the ominous slogan “One vengeance for all,” has been attributed to Iranian state broadcaster IRIB and was later shared by Russian regime outlet RT.
Sequences invoking Native American dispossession, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, the Vietnam War, and more recent Middle Eastern conflicts are featured in the video, casting the US as the world’s enemy.
The U.S. is trapped in this war as long as Iran continues to paralyze traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and as long as Iran continues to attack our allies in the region.
On Wednesday, the White House announced that President Trump is ready to “unleash hell” if a negotiated settlement is not possible…
President Donald Trump is prepared to “unleash hell” if negotiations with Iran fail, the White House said Wednesday, after Tehran rejected an initial U.S. proposal and thousands of American troops were enroute to the Middle East.
“Iran should not miscalculate,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing, adding that if Iran refuses to make a deal to end the war, “President Trump will ensure they are hit harder than they have ever been hit before.”
I don’t know if they got the memo yet, but negotiations have already failed.
So what is Trump planning to do that he is not doing already?
Right now, thousands of U.S. troops are on their way to the Middle East…
Donald Trump is massing a 7,000-strong ground invasion force on Iran’s doorstep after the Islamic regime snubbed a 15-point peace plan with a series of ‘ridiculous’ demands.
Pentagon chiefs ordered around 2,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East last night to join some 4,500 Marines already en route to the region.
The President is prepared to pull the trigger on a full-scale invasion if Tehran continues to rebuff his diplomatic overtures, according to members of his inner circle.
Needless to say, 7,000 troops would not be nearly enough for a ground invasion of Iran.
When you add together the IRGC, the Basij forces, the regular Iranian army and the Iranian reserves, it comes to a grand total of more than a million fighting men.
7,000 U.S. soldiers may be enough to take Kharg island or a couple of smaller islands in the Strait of Hormuz, but then those soldiers would be sitting ducks as the Iranians endlessly bombard them with drones and missiles.
In the end, we would see a lot of dead American service members.
Over the past couple of weeks, Iran has been working hard to reinforce Kharg Island’s defenses…
Iran has been laying traps and moving additional military personnel and air defenses to Kharg Island in recent weeks in preparation for a possible US operation to take control of the island, according to multiple people familiar with US intelligence reporting on the issue.
The Trump administration has been weighing using US troops to seize the tiny island in the northeastern Persian Gulf — an economic lifeline for Iran that handles roughly 90% of the country’s crude exports — as leverage over the Iranians to coerce them to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, CNN has reported.
But US officials and military experts say there would be significant risks involved in such a ground operation, including a large number of US casualties. The island has layered defenses, and the Iranians have moved additional shoulder-fired, surface-to-air guided missile systems known as MANPADs there in recent weeks, the sources said.
I don’t think that taking Kharg Island would be a wise move.
It would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and it would not force the Iranians to capitulate.
So why do it?
It was really easy to start this war, but there is no easy way out.
As long as the Iranian regime exists, it is going to continue to threaten traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
They have made that very clear.
So if the U.S. and Israel want to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, either they will have to give the Iranians everything that they are asking for, conduct a full-blown ground invasion to overthrow the regime, or use nuclear weapons (which should be unthinkable).
At this stage, all of those options are completely unacceptable to the Trump administration.
The Iranians understand that they are the ones with the leverage now, and they are going to be ruthless.
The U.S. and Israel will continue to pummel Iran from the air, but that won’t change the state of play.
Approximately 93 million people live in Iran, and the regime has had 47 years to deeply embed itself in every element of Iranian society.
Trying to get rid of it now will be exceedingly tough.
But allowing it to block traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is intolerable, because that will crash the global economy.
We are caught between a rock and a hard place, and our choices are only going to get even more difficult in the days ahead.
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.