There is a moment in every failed negotiation when one side finally says out loud what everyone else has been thinking. That moment arrived Wednesday in Ankara, when President Donald Trump, seated beside NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte at the alliance’s annual summit, was asked about the status of America’s tentative ceasefire with Iran. His answer required no translation from diplomatic language because he refused to use any.
“For me, I think it’s over,” Trump said. “As far as I’m concerned it’s just a waste of time.”
The president’s verdict came only hours after American forces struck more than 80 Iranian targets, including air defense systems, radar installations, and Revolutionary Guard vessels used to menace commercial shipping. Washington also revoked the waiver that had allowed Tehran to sell its oil on the world market, cutting off a revenue stream the regime had extracted at the negotiating table.
Both moves were retaliation for Iranian attacks on at least three commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz on Monday and Tuesday, the narrow waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s traded oil must pass.
A Regime That Cannot Tell the Truth
Trump’s frustration was not with the terms of the deal but with the character of the men across the table. He accused Iranian negotiators of agreeing to terms in private and then denying them in public, a pattern anyone who has followed four decades of Islamic Republic diplomacy will recognize instantly.
“They’re liars. We make a deal. … They go outside, talk to the press. They say, ‘We never even talked about it.’ … As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”
He left the door open for his negotiators to keep meeting with their Iranian counterparts, then promptly explained why it would accomplish nothing. “They can talk, but I think they’re wasting their time. They’re liars, they’re cheats. They’re sick people.”
The interim agreement, a memorandum of understanding signed June 17 that renewed a truce first reached in April, was supposed to calm the region and reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic. Iran answered that arrangement by firing on the very ships the agreement existed to protect.
Restraint Repaid With Rockets
The detail that should end any lingering debate about who broke faith is the timing. Trump had held American fire to allow the regime to conduct funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader killed in a joint American-Israeli strike on the war’s first day in February. That mourning period, still underway this week, featured regime-organized crowds throwing pebbles at Trump’s image in a symbolic stoning ritual while circulating lists of American officials marked for vengeance.
The president extended a courtesy no one would have faulted him for withholding, and Tehran used the window to resume attacks on civilian shipping. When the United States responded, the Revolutionary Guard launched missiles and drones at American installations in Bahrain and Kuwait, dragging two Gulf states into a fight they wanted no part of.
Kuwait publicly objected to the attacks on its soil. Oil prices jumped more than five percent, with Brent crude climbing above $78 a barrel, as markets priced in what the regime’s apologists still will not admit.
The Mirage of a Deal
The substance of the impasse explains why every apparent breakthrough dissolves. Washington wants Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions and surrender its enriched uranium. Tehran has reportedly demanded joint control of the Strait of Hormuz and the release of billions in frozen assets. One side seeks an end to the threat. The other seeks payment for pausing it. Those are not positions that converge; they are worldviews that collide.
New supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who inherited his father’s office in March, has not been seen in public since taking power. He rules from hiding while his parliament speaker declares that Iran does not fold. A regime confident in its cause does not conceal its leader and lie about its agreements. It does both because deception is not a tactic of the Islamic Republic. It is the operating system.
The psalmist knew this species of adversary well, the kind that treats an outstretched hand as an opening for the knife.
My soul hath long dwelt with him that hateth peace. I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war. (Psalm 120:6-7)
Trump’s declaration that the ceasefire is over is not a failure of diplomacy. It is the overdue acknowledgment that diplomacy was never actually happening, because it takes two honest parties to negotiate and only one showed up.
The mullahs were given a fantastic deal, a funeral truce, and the benefit of the doubt. They spent all three on missiles. Whatever comes next, at least it will come without illusions.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
