(End of the American Dream)—The seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker was an extraordinarily shocking move by the Trump administration. Will it be followed by the seizure of more oil tankers? This is a question that the press really needs to be asking right now. If a U.S. blockade stops the flow of oil coming out of Venezuela, the Chinese will be absolutely furious.
As you will see below, China buys more Venezuelan oil than anyone else. Just imagine how we would feel if someone started grabbing tankers of oil that were eventually headed to the United States. If U.S. officials really do intend to impose a blockade on Venezuelan oil, this could be the beginning of the end of our relationship with the Chinese, and it could potentially lead to global war.
When he was asked about the seizure of the Venezuelan tanker, President Trump said that it was the “largest one ever seized”…
The U.S. military has seized an oil tanker off of Venezuela’s coast, President Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday as his administration continues to escalate military activity in the region.
“As you probably know, we’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela,” Trump said. “Large tanker, very large, largest one ever seized actually.”
Trump did not provide details on the seizure but said that it was an “interesting day.”
Video footage of the seizure is quite dramatic. Soldiers that had arrived in a helicopter rappelled down ropes and raced to the bridge of the tanker…
Footage released by the Trump administration on Wednesday showed American forces swooping on the tanker in helicopters and rappelling down ropes.
Troops with guns drawn darted up stairs to the bridge to take control of the vessel off the coast of Venezuela.
As soon as news of this seizure got out, shocked reactions started coming in from all over the globe on social media.
People could hardly believe what had just happened.
On Twitter, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that this particular tanker was involved in “an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations”…
Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran. For multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations. This seizure, completed off the coast of Venezuela, was conducted safely and securely—and our investigation alongside the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the transport of sanctioned oil continues.
Is this the only tanker that the U.S. intends to seize, or is this the beginning of a full-blown blockade?
The Chinese would be very interested in the answer to that question, because they import more oil from Venezuela than everyone else combined…
Venezuela is one of the largest suppliers of oil to China, which has been the destination of between 55 percent and 90 percent of the country’s oil exports.
A Bloomberg report called the move ‘a serious escalation’ after Trump demanded Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro step down. Caracas did not immediately respond to the seizure.
During 2023, China was importing approximately 430,000 barrels of oil a day from Venezuela.
Are we going to try to keep the Chinese from getting any more oil from the Venezuelans from now on? If so, how will the Chinese respond?
Thanks to their current spat with Japan, the Chinese are already in a really sour mood.
On Tuesday, the Russians and the Chinese conducted a very sizable show of force near Japanese territory…
A Newsweek map shows Russia and China deployed air and naval units—including bombers and an aircraft carrier—for a joint patrol and training near Japan on Tuesday.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the joint air patrol was not directed against third countries, while the Chinese military said the aerial maneuver demonstrated their ability to address security challenges and maintain peace and stability in the region.
Japan‘s Defense Ministry said it scrambled fighter jets to intercept the Russia–China air formation and dispatched a warship to continue monitoring and gathering intelligence on the Chinese aircraft carrier CNS Liaoning, following a “radar lock-on” incident last week.
We should be doing what we can to ease tensions with the Chinese.
Needless to say, the seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker is not going to help matters at all.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov just warned that Russia is prepared to “respond” to any deployment of European troops in Ukraine…
Lavrov said Russian President Vladimir Putin had already stressed that “we are not going to wage war with Europe. We don’t even have such thoughts. But we will respond to any hostile steps, including the deployment of European military contingents in Ukraine and the expropriation of Russian assets,” state media reported.
Our European allies must not send forces into Ukraine, because once the Russians start shooting at them there will be no turning back.
But they are thinking of doing it anyway.
And once the Europeans and the Russians start shooting at one another, there is no way that we will be able to stay out of it.
With so much going on elsewhere, it is a really bad time to be starting a war in South America.
But we just keep daring the Venezuelans to shoot at us. In fact, two F-18 fighter jets spent 40 minutes in Venezuelan airspace on Tuesday…
Two U.S. F-18 fighter jets flying in tandem entered Venezuelan airspace around noon Tuesday, circling over the Gulf of Venezuela in the latest show of force against the regime of Nicolás Maduro.
The flyover — carried out despite the Venezuelan regime’s possession of a number of Russian-made anti-aircraft batteries — took place less than 100 miles northeast of Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city. Thousands of Venezuelans tracked the aircraft online through specialized tracking websites, watching as the jets traced a bow-tie-shaped pattern over the gulf.
The fighters remained inside Venezuelan airspace for at least 40 minutes at an altitude of roughly 25,000 feet before heading north and leaving the area.
We should be very thankful that the Venezuelans showed such restraint.
They probably realize that Washington is looking for an excuse to light them up.
And President Trump is warning Colombian President Gustavo Petro that he could be next…
“He’s going to have himself some big problems if he doesn’t wise up,” he added. “He better wise up or he’ll be next. I hope he’s listening. He’s going to be next.”
Trump noted that Colombia is a “major” drug producer and helps import narcotics into the U.S.
We really are living during a time of “wars and rumors of wars”.
I know that a lot of people out there wish that this was not true, but it is.
Leaders all over the globe have come down with a really bad case of war fever.
We have a very limited window of opportunity to pull back from the brink, and if that doesn’t happen 2026 could rapidly turn into one giant nightmare.
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.
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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.
