(End of the American Dream)—It has often been said that “war is hell”, and that is so true. It has been estimated that somewhere between 70 and 85 million people died during World War II, and now World War III is looming. I just asked Google AI to tell me how many people will die during World War III, and I was told that “it’s likely that the death toll would be devastatingly high, potentially reaching into the billions”.
We are literally closer to that sort of an apocalyptic conflict than we have ever been before, and yet most of the population is partying as if there will be “peace and safety” long into the future. So many of us have been lulled into a false sense of security, but the truth is that the very small window of opportunity that we have to avoid World War III is rapidly closing.
A few hours ago, President Trump posted a very alarming message about Russian President Vladimir Putin on his Truth Social account…
What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!
What “REALLY BAD” things is Trump talking about? I really hope that he will clarify what he meant by that.
AFP is telling us that Trump’s message “showed his frustration” with the Russians…
Trump’s latest broadside showed his frustration with stalled peace talks, and comes two days after he called the Kremlin leader “absolutely CRAZY” following a record Russian drone attack on Ukraine.
For a long time, I have been warning that Trump must not lose patience with the Russians.
Sadly, it appears that is precisely what is happening.
In fact, it is being reported that Trump is considering “lifting all restrictions on how Ukraine uses U.S. supplied weapons against Russia”…
Donald Trump is said to be ‘seriously considering’ lifting all restrictions on how Ukraine uses U.S. supplied weapons against Russia, according to Western officials.
The U.S. president could go further than his predecessor in removing all restrictions imposed by the Biden administration, sources told the Kyiv Post on Monday.
Joe Biden didn’t even go that far.
There would be absolutely no limits to what the Ukrainians could do with U.S. weapons, and the Ukrainians would definitely take advantage of that.
But it still wouldn’t be enough for Ukraine to win the war.
The Russians have been steadily taking more territory, and they have been massing tens of thousands of troops across from the city of Kharkiv in preparation for a summer offensive.
And it appears that summer offensive may already be starting. On Tuesday, it was confirmed that the Russians have just captured four settlements in the Sumy region…
British outlet Sky News had previously reported that up to 50,000 Russian troops were amassing on the Kharkiv border after Moscow successfully dislodged Ukrainian troops from the Russian border region of Kursk, where Kyiv gained a swathe of territory in the summer of 2024. Kursk borders Ukraine’s Sumy region, which neighbors Kharkiv.
The head of the Sumy region, Oleh Hryhorov, on Tuesday confirmed Russia had captured four settlements. Russia added on Tuesday it had struck Ukrainian positions in several Sumy settlements over the previous day.
So how far with the Russians eventually go?
Dmitry Medvedev has suggested that Russia could take nearly all of Ukraine if the war lasts long enough…
However, former Russian president and key Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev took to X to mock any plans for allied buffer zones of control over Ukraine. Sharing a map of the vast country, Mr Medvedev showed almost the entire country covered with a Russian-controlled buffer zone and only a sliver of territory left to Ukraine next to the Polish border.
Mr Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chair of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, wrote on X: “If military aid to the Banderite (Ukrainian nationalist) regime continues, the buffer zone could look like this.”
If Dmitry Medvedev becomes the next president of Russia once Putin passes away, that is going to be very bad news, because he is far more hostile toward western nations than Putin ever was.
Unless something really dramatic happens, Ukraine is going to lose this war and Russia is going to win.
The Ukrainians are desperate for NATO to get directly involved in the war, because that is the only way that Ukraine can emerge victorious from this conflict.
Of course if NATO does get directly involved, that will put us just one step away from nuclear war.
So let us hope that President Trump never even considers this option.
Alarmingly, U.S. forces in Europe have been ramping up preparations for a potential showdown. The following comes from a Wall Street Journal article entitled “The U.S. Reinforces Europe’s Northern Front, Fearing War With Russia”…
At the crack of dawn, a dozen U.S. Marines recently took position in a field on this sleepy Swedish island about 200 miles from the Russian city of Kaliningrad and fired their mobile rocket system.
The dummy munitions splashed into the Baltic Sea, yet they sent a message to Russia: Even as President Trump has thrown NATO into a historic crisis by questioning its efficacy, in Northern Europe, the U.S. military is doubling down.
The Trump administration wants the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to get more “lethal.” A testing ground is Europe’s north, where NATO faces Russia on two sides.
I don’t like the sound of that at all.
Of course we could end up in a war with China in the not too distant future as well.
In fact, we are being warned that the Chinese “could seize Taiwan’s smaller outlying islands as a tactic to intimidate the government in Taipei”…
China could seize Taiwan’s smaller outlying islands as a tactic to intimidate the government in Taipei, a US intelligence report has warned.
Though the vast majority of its population lives on the main island of Taiwan, Taipei also controls a number of smaller island chains including the Kinmen and Matsu close to the Chinese mainland, the Pratas and Taiping in the South China Sea and the Penghu archipelago off Taiwan’s southeastern coast.
Seizing and attempting to annex these islands is among a number of military options available to Beijing as it continues to threaten Taiwan with a wholesale invasion, according to the latest Worldwide Threat Assessment report released earlier this month by the US Defence Intelligence Agency.
It would be wonderful if the “peace and safety” crowd ends up being correct.
Let’s hope that a miracle happens and global leaders find a way to pull us back from the brink of World War III.
But at this moment, things do not look promising at all.
Our last shot at peace with Russia appears to be evaporating, and the war in the Middle East could soon go to an entirely new level.
The clock is ticking, because once someone decides to use a nuclear weapon there will be no turning back.
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.