(The Epoch Times)—As the sun set on the Red Sea on March 15, several F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets launched from the deck of the U.S. aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, on their way to strike Houthi targets across western Yemen for the first time in two months.
Those U.S. fighter jets delivered the first salvo in a renewed military campaign against the Houthis—a U.S.-designated terrorist group currently controlling significant portions of the country, including its capital city Sana’a.
Since March 15, U.S. forces have conducted several additional rounds of airstrikes across Yemen.
In an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” White House national security adviser Mike Waltz said that the latest U.S. strikes killed several key Houthi leaders, and destroyed some of their missiles and other critical infrastructure.
In a March 16 press statement, spokesman for the Houthi movement’s military arm Yahya Saree said some 47 separate U.S. strikes had hit areas of Sana‘a, Sa’dah, Al Bayda, Hajjah, Dhamar, Ma’rib, and Al Jawf. That same day, Yemen’s Houthi-run Health Ministry reported that 31 unarmed civilians had been killed and 101 more injured in the recent U.S. strikes.
The casualty assessments cannot be independently verified at this time.
Speaking at a Pentagon press briefing on March 17, U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich said initial U.S. estimates indicated recent strikes have inflicted dozens of casualties on legitimate combatants. Grynkewich said U.S. military leaders had seen no indications of civilian casualties, despite the claims from within Yemen.
Regarded in Washington as a key regional proxy of Iran’s Islamist regime, the Houthis have been on and off the U.S. list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. Most recently, President Donald Trump ordered the Houthis to be re-designated as a foreign terrorist organization, noting their campaign of drone and missile strikes on Israel and on vessels transiting Middle Eastern waterways that began in October 2023.
Announcing the renewed campaign of strikes on Yemen in a March 15 social media post, Trump told the Houthi leaders their attacks must immediately stop, warning that if they don’t, “hell will rain down upon you like nothing you have ever seen before!”
Despite Trump’s warning message, the Houthis have claimed to have targeted the Truman Carrier Strike Group with return fire on multiple occasions. Saree said that Houthi forces had launched a total of 18 ballistic and cruise missiles and an attack drone at U.S. warships operating in the northern Red Sea by March 16 and at least two more cruise missiles and two more drones by March 18.
Houthis Link Standoff to Gaza
The Houthis began attacking vessels through the Middle Eastern waterways shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks on southern Israel. From the start, Houthi leaders claimed solidarity with Hamas, which it sees as representing the Palestinian cause, and vowed they would conduct their attacks as a way to pressure Israel to discontinue its military operations against Hamas’s capabilities in the Gaza Strip.
Between October 2023 and January 2025, the Houthis launched several barrages of drones and missiles directly at Israel and targeted more than 100 vessels in the surrounding waterways, damaging dozens of vessels and sinking two. The Houthis also led a helicopter-borne assault on the Bahamas-flagged vehicle carrier Galaxy Leader in November 2023, hijacking the ship and taking its 25 crew members hostage.
The Biden administration initially deployed U.S. warships to help intercept the Houthi drones and missiles on shipping traffic through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden. As the attacks continued, the Biden administration stepped up its military action, ordering direct U.S. strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.
Despite the earlier rounds of U.S. bombardment, the Houthis continued their attacks until January of this year, when Israel and Hamas entered into the first phase of a cease-fire framework to end the fighting in the Gaza Strip. In addition to halting their attacks, the Houthis also released the crew of the Galaxy Leader after 459 days.
The temporary Gaza cease-fire has faltered in recent weeks as Israeli and Hamas negotiators have disagreed on how the peace process should advance. Israel has supported an extension of the first cease-fire phase to allow more time to work out the details, but Hamas representatives rejected that idea and demanded all parties proceed to the second phase, wherein Israeli forces would withdraw from the Gaza Strip altogether.
With Israeli and Hamas negotiators split, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an order on March 2, cutting off all supplies entering into the Gaza Strip.
On March 11, the Houthis announced they would resume their pressure campaign against Israel by targeting any and all Israeli vessels in the Red Sea.
Michael Horton, a fellow at the Jamestown Foundation who has studied the Red Sea region, said that the Houthis effectively used the Gaza conflict to rally their base of support.
“It plays very well in Yemen. It’s bought them a lot of support, so I think they’ll continue to use it,” Horton said in a phone interview with The Epoch Times.
While the Houthis seek to justify their attacks on commercial ships by tying them to the situation in the Gaza Strip, Heritage Foundation senior policy analyst Daniel Flesch said the Trump administration should not be persuaded to let up.
“We should not let what they have done the last 18 months go unanswered,” Flesch told The Epoch Times.
Trump Raises Stakes For Iran
The Houthis, a predominantly Zaidi Shia Islamist movement, first emerged in opposition to the internationally-recognized Yemeni government. In 2014, the rebel Houthi faction seized Sana’a, leading the then-Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi to resign and flee the Yemeni capital city. Hadi later revoked his resignation and formed a government in exile in the Yemeni port city of Aden.
Yemen has remained in a state of civil war since 2014. This Yemeni internal conflict has also become one proxy battle in a broader contest for regional influence between the West-aligned Saudi-led Arab coalition, which is focused on preventing the spread of extremist ideologies, and Iran’s anti-West Islamist regime.
Shortly after Hadi relaunched his government in Aden, Saudi Arabia formed a coalition of Arab Gulf states, including United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Bahrain, Sudan, and Kuwait, to back Hadi’s government militarily. By 2015, the United States also began supplying arms, intelligence, and logistical support for the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen.
Since 2015, U.S. forces have repeatedly seized vessels carrying weapons off the coast of Yemen, which they’ve assessed are being directed by Tehran to areas of Houthi control. Tehran has routinely denied any such military assistance to the Yemeni rebel faction.
In a March 17 social media post, Trump indicated that his administration will consider the actions of the Houthis to be inextricably linked to Tehran.
“Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences,” he wrote. “And those consequences will be dire!”
Flesch said the warning to Iran marks a key change in the U.S. approach to the Red Sea standoff.
“The [Trump] administration is coming out forceful and stating clearly, first off, to the Houthis, ‘Continued disruption of international shipping will not stand.’ And more importantly, ‘We see you Iran, and your connection to the Houthis,’” Flesch said.
In a March 18 letter to the U.N. Security Council, Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations Amir Saeid Iravani again insisted that Iran has not armed the Houthis and is not directing their actions.
Horton said that Tehran provides intelligence and likely advises the Houthis on some aspects of target selection, but Yemeni commanders most often make their own decisions when it comes to which targets to attack.
Battle Plans and Next Steps
In President Joe Biden’s final year in office, the U.S. military cycled four different carrier strike groups into position to intercept Houthi attacks and strike targets in Yemen. The U.S. military also deployed B-2 Spirit stealth bombers to destroy underground weapon storage sites.
As Grynkewich discussed the latest U.S. strikes at the March 17 Pentagon press briefing, he faced questions about how these new operations differ from those seen under Biden. The Air Force general said he wouldn’t get into too many specifics due to operational security concerns, but said U.S. forces now have a broader set of targets in Yemen.
Grynkewich said Trump had also delegated authorities down to operational commanders on the scene, lowering the approval requirement for ordering new attacks.
“That allows us to achieve a tempo of operations where we can react to opportunities that we see on the battlefield, in order to continue to put pressure on the Houthis,” he said.
The Houthis control much of northwest Yemen, where nearly 80 percent of the country’s population of 32 million resides.
Horton warned that civilian casualties from intensifying U.S. strikes could drive more Yemenis to support the Houthis. He argued that any viable plan to counter, contain, and defeat the Houthis would have to be driven by Yemenis themselves.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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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.
