The older I get, the more suspiciously I look at the causes of war. This is natural. Young people — especially young men — are incapable of properly evaluating risk. Though they are rebellious, they also follow orders from authority figures. There is a reason why eighteen-year-olds are sent over embankments to cross open fields on the frontlines: They can be convinced to pursue success and ignore mortality. Courageous young men look right past danger. Only years later do they ask themselves, “Why the hell did I do that?”
There is no question that we are being psychologically prepped for a great and terrible war. Whether you are a civilian, veteran, or active service member, you surely have heard over the last ten years at least one commanding officer describe publicly the likelihood of a U.S.-China war or wider WWIII in the near future.
European politicians have been instructing their citizens to prepare for a full-on military conflict with Russian forces since the current war in Ukraine began. Such civilian war preparations have not been limited to the Baltic states, Finland, or Poland. France and the United Kingdom have spent the last several years conditioning citizens to expect bloodshed with the Russian Federation.
During the half-century Cold War, violence operated mainly in the shadows and through “proxies” so that the United States and the Soviet Union could at least pretend they were not directly fighting one another. Such was the shared fear of nuclear weapons — and of mutually assured destruction — that even bitter enemies did what they could to limit runaway escalation. The Moscow-Washington hotline — or what Hollywood mythologized as the doom-averting “red phone” — was established because both sides understood the stakes of WWIII.
Cold War warriors generally took to heart a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” With this warning lingering in the minds of men who could unleash global annihilation with the pressing of a few buttons, humanity has somehow avoided destroying itself in the eighty years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In my estimation, the mood has radically changed over the last fifteen years. A more cavalier attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons has replaced decades-long angst and circumspection. Senators, generals, and even diplomats publicly make the case for the use of terrible weapons that could easily lead to mass slaughter on a scale never before witnessed. Gone are the days of worrying about the end of life as we know it. In their place, a new generation of military and political leaders seem to be not so quietly echoing a spine-chilling refrain: How will nuclear weapons deter our enemies if we are habitually afraid to use them?
Five years after mass hysteria concerning COVID convinced much of the world to shut down for no good reason, more people are familiar with the concept of “mass formation psychosis.” Simply stated, this phenomenon exists when large numbers of people believe in something detached from reality. I put COVID in the same category as man-made “climate change.” I believe that a large percentage of the global population has been manipulated to believe that both are much more dangerous than they really are.
For hundreds of years, academic studies have shown how political leaders exploit the “madness of crowds” to their advantage. In the early twentieth century, “propaganda” even had a positive connotation, as the “elites” of the day argued that “educated” people have a moral duty to corral the masses. In Public Opinion, writer Walter Lippmann argues explicitly that “experts” should use a combination of propaganda and censorship to “manufacture” the consent of the “bewildered herd.” If the “educated” class finds it useful to scare the dickens out of humanity with regard to coronaviruses and carbon dioxide, it will do so.
With this in mind, it is entirely possible that I am serving as a useful idiot when it comes to worries over WWIII. Perhaps I am doing exactly what Lippmann’s disciples wish me to do by professing my genuine concerns regarding the devastating global conflict heading our way. It still feels like yesterday, however, when I was reading of the likelihood of Islamic terror attacks on U.S. soil years before the murder of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. Now I read and hear similar predictions for a great war ahead, and I cannot help but be filled with terrible dread.
As with all matters involving mass communication and public opinion, the whole thing devolves into a “chicken or the egg” quandary rather fast. Am I writing about WWIII because so many signs indicate that it will arrive within the decade? Or am I inadvertently pushing what I wish to avoid by helping to convince society that it is imminent? Putting the dilemma of causality aside, I will say that I learned long ago that the war machine first prepares the public for conflict in the information space before officially firing weapons on the battlefield.
As distasteful as it sounds, the military considers civilian minds part of the overall battlespace during war. Before every conflict begins, the social consciousness is shaped to accept, expect, and engage in battle. It feels as if we are being directed toward global war today.
Such an assertion might appear strange coming in the same week that President Trump is brokering peace in the Middle East. Even casual students of war would expect that region of the world to be fully enflamed during any true global conflict. Yet there are over fifty other conflicts raging around the world today, and over ninety countries are involved in battles beyond their territorial borders.
Although some Western societies can be hypnotized into believing that the world is enjoying relative peace, war is spreading faster today than it has since WWII. Even with so much bloodshed, though, we have seen nothing that approaches the level of violence that will unfold should the Russia-Ukraine war transform into a U.S.-Russia war or simmering tensions between China and Taiwan transform into a direct showdown between the U.S. and China.
For the last decade, military academics have been predicting a global war by 2030. Suspiciously, that is the date that the World Economic Forum, United Nations, and other globalist institutions have been highlighting as a universal “pivot” for humanity. Artificial intelligence is evolving quickly. Plans for mandatory digital identifications are taking hold across Europe. Central banks are designing government-controlled digital currencies. The European Union wants access to all private communications. As president, Joe Biden constructed a “disinformation board” to filter public information and censor dissent. The walls of a grand surveillance prison are being built all around us, while the same powers that be are preparing the public for economic hardship and prolonged war.
We may not like it. We may not want it. But it appears our “betters” expect us to take it in stride.
There is another option. It is at least possible that billions of humans on this planet learn to push back. Rather than permitting a handful of “elites” to dictate “public opinion,” the public might discover that it has some control over its opinions, too. If enough people refuse to engage in senseless slaughter, perhaps the globalists who wish to lead us to war will discover that no-one is much interested in following. Nothing so perfectly epitomizes the “madness of crowds,” after all, than millions of young people rushing carelessly into the madness of war.
For the sake of those who will otherwise lose their lives in the coming fights, I pray that wiser stewards of peace chart the course ahead.
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.