(End of the American Dream)—The Russians keep warning us that launching long-range missiles provided by NATO into Russia could spark a nuclear war, but that hasn’t done any good. In fact, more ATACMS missiles provided by the United States were just fired at the Russian city of Taganrog. By approving these long-range missile strikes, Joe Biden has literally brought us to the brink of nuclear war. Thankfully, there is one thing that is preventing Russia from unleashing a nuclear apocalypse right now.
The Russians are counting down the days to the inauguration of Donald Trump, because they see him as the last best hope for peace. The Russians would very much prefer to avoid a nuclear confrontation, and they have been greatly encouraged by what Trump has been saying about the war in Ukraine. But if the Russians ultimately conclude that there is no way to avoid an all-out war between our two nations after negotiating with Trump, all bets are off.
While most Americans are focused on holiday festivities, events on the other side of the globe threaten to spiral out of control.
The Russians are telling us that they will “definitely” respond to the long-range missile attack on the city of Taganrog…
The Kremlin said Thursday it would “definitely” respond to a Ukrainian attack on a military airfield in its south that used U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Russia would respond to the ATACMS strike on a military airfield in the southern city of Taganrog, in the Rostov region.
President Vladimir Putin has previously threatened to launch Russia’s new hypersonic ballistic missile, named Oreshnik, at the center of Kyiv if Ukraine does not halt its attacks on Russian territory with U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles.
I don’t even want to think about what an Oreshnik missile could do to the center of the city of Kiev.
That would be a major escalation, and so let us hope that it does not happen.
But the Biden administration is warning that the Russians appear to be gearing up to launch another Oreshnik soon…
A U.S. official said on Wednesday that Russia could launch another hypersonic ballistic missile in Ukraine in the coming days, but Washington does not consider the Oreshnik weapon a game-changer in the war.
The good news is that the Russians are not going to use nuclear weapons at this stage. Before they cross that threshold, they want to talk with Trump first to see if something can be worked out.
On Thursday, Trump was named Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”…
Donald Trump once publicly speculated that Time would never name him the news magazine’s “Person of the Year.”
Now, the honor has been bestowed on him twice.
Time on Thursday named Trump as this year’s choice, recognizing the president-elect as the individual or group deemed to have wielded the greatest influence on global affairs “for good or for ill.” To celebrate the unveiling of the magazine cover, Trump will ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. Trump sat for a wide-ranging interview with the magazine last month.
During his interview with Time Magazine, Trump had quite a bit to say about the war in Ukraine.
In fact, he specifically stated that it was a “foolish decision” for Joe Biden to authorize long-range missile strikes deep into Russia…
Joe Biden’s decision to permit Ukraine to use American-supplied long-range missiles on targets inside Russia was “foolish” and a “major escalation” in the conflict, according to President-elect Donald Trump.
“Anything can happen. Anything can happen. It’s a very volatile situation,” President-elect Trump said of the Ukraine conflict in an interview with Time on November 25, published on Thursday. “I think the most dangerous thing right now is what’s happening, where [Volodymyr] Zelensky has decided, with the approval of, I assume, the president, to start shooting missiles into Russia. I think that’s a major escalation. I think it’s a foolish decision.”
For those of us that are hopeful that a nuclear war can be avoided, those are really good words to hear.
In addition, Trump also told Time Magazine that he personally disagrees “very vehemently” with what Biden has decided to do…
“I disagree very vehemently with sending missiles hundreds of miles into Russia,” Trump said in his interview with Time. “Why are we doing that? We’re just escalating this war and making it worse. That should not have been allowed to be done.”
I think that it is clear that Trump wants to work out something with the Russians. But will that be possible?
Our European allies definitely do not want this war to end. In fact, the secretary general of NATO just warned that “we are not ready for what is coming”, and he is urging western countries to prepare for war with Russia.
In Washington D.C., most members of Congress on both sides of the aisle do not want this war to end either. They want to keep fighting until Ukraine has won, but that simply is not going to happen.
Right now the Russians are gobbling up territory faster than they have since the early days of the conflict, and as long as they hold the “strategic initiative” they will not have an incentive to end the war until all of their goals have been achieved…
It’s a feature of our days that the Intelligence heads of the great powers have been acting in a quasi-diplomatic function, stepping out of the shadows of the world of espionage to engage in open discussion of the issues.
That applies to CIA’s director Burns, the Ukrainian Budanov, and also to Russia’s spy chief, Sergei Naryshkin.
Heading Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SRV), the current incarnation of the famous (and infamous) KBG, Naryshkin has said that Russia is ‘close to achieving all its war goals and holds the strategic initiative in all areas of the war.’
The Russians have been publicly telling us that in order for the war to end Ukraine must forget about joining NATO and there cannot be any NATO forces on Ukrainian soil when the conflict is over.
On the other side, the Ukrainians are insisting on being allowed to join NATO when the war has concluded, and they want a very large contingent of western troops on Ukrainian soil in order to prevent the Russians from invading again.
I don’t see how that gap can be bridged any time soon.
In addition, the Russians say that they want to keep all of the territory that they have captured, and that is a non-starter for the Ukrainians.
The Ukrainians are acting as if they still have a chance to win this war, but that doesn’t make sense. According to ABC News, about a million Ukrainian soldiers have died since the war began. It is also being reported that “hundreds of thousands” of soldiers have lost limbs. Ukrainian forces are completely worn out, and they are losing more ground with each passing day.
The only way that the Ukrainians could win this war would be for NATO to get directly involved in fighting Russia. As I have repeatedly warned, once we are in a direct war with Russia it is just a matter of time before it goes nuclear. For now, Donald Trump is the only thing standing between us and nuclear war.
Will he be able to successfully negotiate with the Russians and bring this horrible ordeal to an end? We better hope so, because at this moment we are closer to nuclear war than we have ever been before.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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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.
