(The Center Square)–The U.S. departments of State and Homeland Security issued warnings to Americans on Sunday in all 50 states and living abroad of heightened security concerns and potential terrorist attacks after President Donald Trump’s targeted strikes against Iranian nuclear sites.
The State Department issued a Worldwide Caution Security Alert advising U.S. citizens overseas to exercise increased caution.
“The conflict between Israel and Iran has resulted in disruptions to travel and periodic closure of airspace across the Middle East,” the warning states. “There is the potential for demonstrations against U.S. citizens and interests abroad,” which is why the warning “advises U.S. citizens worldwide to exercise increased caution.”
It’s encouraging Americans to review travel advisories by country identified on a map, to enroll in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program to receive email updates from local U.S. embassies or consulates while overseas, and to regularly review security alerts and travel advisory information.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin for all U.S. citizens stating, “The ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States. Low-level cyber-attacks against U.S. networks by pro-Iranian hacktivists are likely, and cyber actors affiliated with the Iranian government may conduct attacks against US networks.
“Iran also has a long-standing commitment to target US Government officials it views as responsible for the death of an Iranian military commander killed in January 2020,” the warning states, noting that violent extremists living in the U.S. may be motivated to commit violence in response to the targeted attacks against Iran. Such attacks “would likely increase if Iranian leadership issued a religious ruling calling for retaliatory violence against targets” in the U.S., the warning adds. Recent terrorist attacks in the U.S. were motivated by antisemitic or anti-Israel sentiment, the warning notes, “and the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict could contribute to US-based individuals plotting additional attacks.”
The DHS NTASB states that hacktivists and Iranian government-affiliated actors have routinely targeted poorly secured U.S. networks and Internet-connected devices for disruptive cyberattacks. U.S. law enforcement agencies have also disrupted multiple potentially lethal Iranian-backed plots in the U.S. since 2020, it notes.
Since the Iran-Israel conflict, DHS said it’s seen statements issued by foreign terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, Iranian-backed Yemeni Houthis, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, among others, calling for violence against Americans living in the Middle East. Violent extremists and hate crime perpetrators could also attack Jewish or pro-Israel targets, the U.S. military or U.S. government targets, the bulletin notes.
The warnings were issued after a series of events occurred before the targeted strike against Iran. This includes a conflict between Israel and Iran and Trump receiving a threat from Iran while attending the G7 summit in Canada that if he ordered strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran would activate sleeper cells in the U.S. to launch terror attacks against Americans, NBC News reported. Trump cut his time at the G7 Summit short, rushed back to the White House for an emergency national security briefing, and on Saturday announced targeted strikes against Iran.
Border czar Tom Homan and others have told The Center Square no one knows how many Iranians are in the U.S. who could make up an unknown number of sleeper cells. More than two million foreign nationals illegally entered the U.S. under the Biden administration as gotaways – those who illegally entered between ports of entry to intentionally evade capture, The Center Square exclusively reported.
From fiscal years 2021 through 2024, Border Patrol agents apprehended 1,504 Iranian nationals who illegally entered the U.S. between ports of entry nationwide, The Center Square reported. More than 700 of them were released into the country by the Biden administration.
The greatest number of Iranians who illegally entered the U.S. and were apprehended and the greatest number of Iranians released into the U.S. by the Biden administration were in 2023 and 2024, according to the data.
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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.
