Ever since Iran’s “Islamic Revolution” succeeded in erecting a theocratic regime whose leaders condemn America as the “Great Satan,” call for “death to America,” and kill American soldiers, a question has hung in the air: How many years would the United States tolerate an Islamic dictatorship that murders American citizens, threatens America’s economic interests, and annually celebrates having held fifty-two Americans hostage for four hundred and forty-four days by burning American flags? The answer might be forty-seven.
As is his wont, President Trump appears to be grabbing the status quo by its ear and squeezing it as it squeals in pain. The theocratic police state that has brutally run Iran for nearly a half-century has also financed, provided material support for, and carried out more acts of terrorism around the world than any other nation.
Iran’s agents have murdered civilians on every populated continent and murdered members of America’s Armed Forces on both land and sea. Iran’s Islamic terrorists don’t build; they bury roadside bombs meant to mangle the bodies of unfortunate travelers. Iran’s Islamic terrorists don’t support free trade; they seize private maritime vessels and mine international shipping lanes.
Iran’s Islamic terrorists don’t seek peace; they demand the nuclear destruction of Israel and the United States.
President Obama begged the Iranians for mercy by conceding to the terrorist regime’s every demand in a lopsided nuclear “deal,” handing the Islamic theocrats billions of dollars in cash, and betraying American victims of Iranian terrorism whose court judgments have never been satisfied. The Obama and Biden administrations were so desperate to prop up Iran’s Islamic tyrants that the Democrats bent over backwards to appease terrorists who celebrate the slaughter of Americans.
President Trump has chosen a different path. In the forty-seventh year of a destructive Islamic terror-state, America’s forty-seventh president has decided that governments celebrating the deaths of Americans should not be allowed to exist. Trump gave Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei numerous chances to submit to American demands.
Khamenei chose “death to America,” so now Khamenei is dead. This continues a trend in American military posture over the last several months. After giving Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro the chance to choose exile (an opportunity he refused), President Trump snatched him up in the middle of the night and likely ended twenty-seven years of communist rule in one of the Western Hemisphere’s most important countries.
By quarantining the waters around Cuba and preventing oil shipments from reaching the island nation, President Trump’s actions may lead to the collapse of a communist regime that has been in power for sixty-seven years. When Trump’s carrots don’t work, he pulls out big sticks.
From a position that prioritizes America’s strategic interests, these actions were long overdue. After all, it has always been a bit incongruous for the United States to project “superpower” and “unipolar” strength, while appearing seemingly incapable of squashing Iran’s Islamic terrorists or the advance of communist regimes within America’s own backyard.
As the world changes quickly and likely becomes more dangerous for the foreseeable future, President Trump has decided that it’s time to “settle all family business.” That famous movie line — from Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece The Godfather — seems appropriate for these circumstances. In the film, Al Pacino’s Mafia don utters it after having successfully taken revenge against every party that had ever injured his family.
Today, America’s “Don” is patiently, methodically, and strategically doing the same thing. Although his political enemies have abused the “justice” system to investigate him frivolously, secure improper convictions, and tarnish his reputation, President Trump is no criminal. But he is a bit of a “gangster,” in the sense that he knows how to use America’s reputation for strength in a way that protects American lives. When America’s enemies consider harming Americans away from home, they must now look up the street to see if President “Don” is already swinging his nail-spiked bat. Unlike some of his invertebrate predecessors, Trump understands that effective deterrence requires the biggest, baddest dude on the block to deliver an occasional beating.
While President Trump’s warnings to Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran have not been mere bluster, his actions against those countries’ leaders are not the products of mindless rage either. Look around at where the world is heading.
Whether we are ready for it or not, the global technology landscape is rapidly changing. The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and it will likely change everything. Not only are we already seeing how AI will replace human jobs in almost every professional field, but also we have begun to see how AI will dramatically reshape the battlefield. Reports indicate that AI may have assisted Delta Force operatives in their mission to extract Maduro from his heavily fortified Caracas compound.
AI-operated “drone swarms” have hunted targets in Russia and Ukraine. AI systems are already curating online information, policing social media platforms, and assisting in state-directed information warfare. The U.S. Department of War is integrating AI across military platforms.
As U.S. military planners quickly adapt to technological innovation in order to stay ahead of enemies and adversaries around the world, long-term strategic worries mount. Can the advantages of AI be effectively corralled, or will AI also become an effective and deadly tool for hostile regimes?
One of the lessons learned during the War in Ukraine has been that relatively inexpensive drones can cause colossal damage to weapons systems that cost billions of dollars. If guerrilla insurgents (or rogue regimes or terrorists) with minimal resources can inflict tremendous damage upon superior fighting forces, then the limitations of asymmetric warfare go out the window. If AI proliferates across the globe, then presumably nuclear proliferation follows, too. We are heading toward a future when AI, drones, and even inexpensive autonomous robots will likely minimize the disparate military lethality of poor and wealthy nations.
With such an unpredictable future headed our way, President Trump is settling the American family’s past business before old foes have a chance to transform into something even more threatening. He is urgently addressing American vulnerabilities around the world. His actions reveal intent to prepare for the worst-case scenarios rapidly heading our way. His attack on Iran should be seen through this lens.
Consider the geopolitical chess moves that President Trump has made in his first year back in office. He has reasserted the Monroe Doctrine and is actively building “Fortress America” in the Western hemisphere. He is strengthening economic and military alliances with regional powers such as Japan, India, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Poland, and Hungary. He is working to neutralize hostile regimes that threaten global fuel supplies and international shipments. He is expanding American control over regions of the world with abundant supplies of hydrocarbon energies and other natural resources that have become only more critical in the emerging AI age. He is even looking for ways to cooperate with the Russian Federation, create economic ties with long-term adversaries, end unnecessary wars, and build the foundations for some semblance of peace. President Trump is right now preparing the United States for an uncertain future in much the same way that an industrious squirrel stores nuts to survive the harsh winter ahead.
Attacking Iran comes with risks. Only time will tell whether this military operation makes America safer and the world more stable. Ask yourself this, though: What is it that the president sees down the road that has convinced him to take action against Iran right now?
As with all decisions that come from the Oval Office, there’s always much more to the story than what is plainly visible. Threats are growing. Uncertainties are exploding. President Trump is battening down the hatches because the storm outside is brewing. He seeks future peace through present strength.
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.