President Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Monday, issuing a direct call for Israel and Iran to “immediately stop shooting” amid a sharp escalation that has tested the limits of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire from April. The latest exchanges of missiles and strikes mark the most significant breach since that fragile truce took hold, raising fresh questions about the path to a lasting resolution in a conflict that has already reshaped the Middle East.
According to reports, Iran launched a barrage of missiles toward Israel in retaliation for Israeli actions, prompting Israeli forces to strike military targets in Tehran and other Iranian locations, including air defense systems and a petrochemical facility linked to weapons production.
Houthis in Yemen joined the fray, adding another layer of proxy involvement that underscores the regional web of Iranian influence. Yet Trump, undeterred, continues to express optimism that negotiations can prevail.
This flare-up did not emerge in a vacuum. Tensions had simmered over Israeli operations in southern Lebanon, which Iran viewed as a violation of broader understandings. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back against American appeals for restraint, leading to the current cycle of retaliation.
U.S. officials noted the Trump-Netanyahu conversation was polite but firm, with Israel proceeding despite Washington’s preference for de-escalation to protect ongoing diplomatic efforts.
The stakes extend far beyond the immediate battlefield. For months, the Trump administration has pursued a deal to neutralize Iran’s nuclear ambitions, reopen critical shipping lanes like the Strait of Hormuz, and diminish the regime’s capacity to export terror. These latest strikes threaten to unravel that progress, spiking oil prices and drawing in additional actors. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has warned of “more severe and crushing measures,” while Israel signals readiness for sustained operations.
Trump’s message cuts through the noise with characteristic directness. Both sides have roles to play, and endless escalation serves no one’s long-term interests—least of all America’s. His approach prioritizes strength through diplomacy backed by undeniable military superiority, a formula that brought initial ceasefires and forced Iran to the table after decisive early actions in the conflict.
He highlighted the problem further with a subsequent post on Truth Social:
Both sides, Israel and Iran, are looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE! Final negotiations on “Peace” are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way. The Blockade will remain in place, and in full force and effect, until a “Final Deal” is reached. Things should move quickly. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Critics on the left and within certain foreign policy circles have long portrayed Trump’s engagement as erratic, yet the pattern reveals a leader unwilling to accept perpetual conflict or allow Iran to dictate terms through proxies and proxies’ proxies.
The regime in Tehran, long a sponsor of chaos from Hezbollah to the Houthis, faces a moment of reckoning. Continued aggression risks not only American intervention but the very survival of its theocratic grip on power.
Israel, rightly focused on its security amid existential threats, must weigh the benefits of calibrated responses against the broader goal of regional stability. Netanyahu’s defiance highlights the complexities of alliance management, but America’s vital interests demand coordination. A deal that prevents Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons while curbing its ballistic missile program and terror financing remains the prize worth pursuing.
As the dust settles from this latest exchange, one truth stands clear: weakness invites war, while resolve backed by moral clarity opens paths to peace. The United States, under President Trump, has demonstrated it will not be drawn into endless quagmires on the mullahs’ terms.
In the midst of these unfolding events, Scripture reminds us of the enduring battle between good and evil, and the call to seek wisdom in leadership. As the prophet Isaiah declared, “And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4).
True peace flows not from appeasement of tyrants but from confronting evil with unyielding truth and justice.
The coming days will test whether cooler heads—or at least calculated restraint—can prevail. Trump’s insistence on stopping the shooting while advancing negotiations offers a pragmatic off-ramp.
For the sake of American security, Israeli survival, and a more stable world, let us pray it is heeded. The alternative is a wider war that no rational actor should desire.
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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.
