(The Economic Collapse Blog)—2025 is certainly turning out to be a year of war. Unfortunately, it appears that several global conflicts have now reached a tipping point. I know that everyone wants to talk about Joe Biden’s cancer right now, but the information that I am about to share with you is far more important.
If our leaders are not extremely careful, we could find ourselves right in the middle of the kinetic phase of World War III very rapidly.
Israel vs. Hamas
In a previous article, I warned that Israel’s security cabinet had approved a plan to take control of all of Gaza, and on Sunday that plan was activated…
The Israel Defense Forces posted on its X account on Sunday: “IDF troops have begun extensive ground operations throughout northern and southern Gaza as part of Operation ‘Gideon’s Chariot.’
“Over the past week, the IAF [Israeli Air Force] conducted a preliminary wave of strikes, striking over 670 Hamas terror targets throughout Gaza to disrupt enemy preparations and support ground operations. The IAF continues to provide consistent support to operating troops in Gaza.
“Thus far, the troops eliminated dozens of terrorists, dismantled terrorist infrastructure sites above and below ground, and are currently being deployed in key positions within Gaza.
“The IDF will continue to operate against the terrorist organizations in Gaza as required, in order to defend Israeli civilians.”
Do you remember the massive anti-Israel protests that we witnessed last year?
If Israel really does attempt to take total control of Gaza, what we will witness this year will be even more dramatic.
In addition, there is a very real possibility that some of Israel’s neighbors could decide to intervene militarily on behalf of the Palestinians.
Israel vs. Yemen
On Friday, the IDF conducted another huge wave of airstrikes on the Houthis in Yemen…
Israeli fighter jets carried out a wave of airstrikes in Yemen on Friday afternoon, targeting two Houthi-controlled ports in the west of the country, and threatened to kill the terror group’s leader, in response to the Iran-backed group’s ongoing missile and drone attacks on Israel.
Israel had waited until the end of US President Donald Trump’s visit to the region before launching its reprisal strikes on the Houthis. Since the Israel Defense Force’s last strike on Yemen, on May 6, the Houthis launched at least seven missiles and two drones at Israel, the latest of them on Thursday night.
Fifteen fighter jets were involved in the strike on Friday, dropping some 35 munitions on the Hodeidah and Salif ports, destroying infrastructure, the military said.
In response, the Houthis fired two long-range missiles at Ben Gurion Airport…
Sirens had sounded across central Israel, including in Tel Aviv, and the Shfela and Sharon regions, sending nearly a million residents scrambling to bomb shelters. Preceding the sirens by some five minutes, an early warning was issued to residents, alerting civilians of the long-range missile attack via a push notification on their phones.
Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree later said the group targeted Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv with two ballistic missiles, vowing to carry on with the strikes until the “siege is lifted” on Gaza, where Israel has been fighting a 19-month war against Hamas.
The Israel Defense Forces said air defenses successfully intercepted a missile at around 2 a.m. The reason for the discrepancy in the number of missiles was unclear, but suggested that one had fallen short.
At this stage, the two sides are essentially at war, and that is a very dangerous thing because the Houthis are very closely allied with Iran.
The U.S. and Israel vs. Iran
Many were hoping that President Trump would be able to make “the deal of the century” with Iran.
Unfortunately, those hopes appear to be fading.
On Saturday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei viciously lashed out at President Trump…
Just hours after President Donald Trump concluded his Middle East visit, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday launched a tirade against America and Israel, charging that Trump is a liar and calling for the destruction of the Jewish state.
“Trump said he wants to use power for peace. He’s lying,” wrote Khamenei on X, adding, “Some of the remarks made during the US President’s trip to the region aren’t even worth a response at all. The level of those remarks is so low that they are a source of shame for the American nation.”
That certainly does not sound like a man that is ready for peace.
And Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi just reiterated the fact that the Iranians will never, ever give up nuclear enrichment…
“In the meantime, the messaging we—and the world—continue to receive is confusing and contradictory. Iran nonetheless remains determined and straightforward: Respect our rights and terminate your sanctions, and we have a deal,” Araghchi said. “Mark my words: there is no scenario in which Iran abandons its hard-earned right to enrichment for peaceful purposes: a right afforded to all other NPT signatories, too,” he added.
So now President Trump has a decision to make.
Either he will allow the Iranians to enrich uranium, or he will give the green light to military action against Iran.
Of course once the U.S. and Israel start bombing Iran, there will be no turning back.
Russia vs. NATO-backed Ukraine
On Friday, we learned what Russia wants to end the war in Ukraine, and it is a lot…
- Ukraine agreeing to neutral status regarding NATO
- No foreign troops in Ukraine
- No nuclear weapons in Ukraine
- De-facto recognition of Crimea and lost eastern territories as now Russia’s
- Withdrawal of Kiev forces from these territories before a ceasefire takes effect
In my opinion, the Russians are asking for too much.
But they are winning the war, and throughout history those that win wars have usually set the terms for peace.
The Ukrainians were outraged that the Russians asked for complete control of four eastern regions, but Russian negotiators reportedly warned that the Ukrainians should accept the deal that is currently on the table because the Russians might ask for eight regions next time…
Story has been making rounds that Ukrainians were outraged when Russia negotiators said that Ukrainian soldiers must leave the four new Russian regions as part of ceasefire, to which the Moscow delegation replied “Next time it will be five.”
Now, our reporter in Istanbul got to ask the Russian side how it really went down:
“We didn’t say five. We said eight.”
Right now, the two sides are not even in the same universe as far as what a potential peace deal would look like.
On Monday, President Trump will be speaking with Vladimir Putin in an attempt to get the peace process back on track…
Donald Trump will speak on Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin on ending the Ukraine war, the US president announced.
“THE SUBJECTS OF THE CALL WILL BE, STOPPING THE ‘BLOODBATH’ THAT IS KILLING, ON AVERAGE, MORE THAN 5000 RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS A WEEK, AND TRADE,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday.
The Russians feel like they have all the leverage at this stage, because their troops just continue to move forward in eastern Ukraine…
Servicemen of the Russian army units have occupied the settlement of Alexandropol. This was reported by the Russian Defense Ministry. The village is located in the Yasinovataya district of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).
In April, the Russian army occupied two more settlements in this region of the DPR: Rozovka and the village of Vesyoloye .
Since the beginning of May, this is already the tenth settlement that has come under Russian control in this republic. The day before, the Ministry of Defense reported the capture of the village of Volnoye Pole in the DPR.
Personally, I think that the Russians are being quite foolish.
This is our one chance to end this conflict.
If negotiations fail, western nations will impose more sanctions and will provide Ukraine with a lot more military aid.
Then we will be in a worse position than we were before. Both sides will be desperate to win, and it certainly wouldn’t take much to push us into a direct conflict with the Russians.
And once we are in a direct conflict with the Russians, we will be just one step away from nuclear war.
We need to end this madness while we still can.
Sadly, the entire world is feeling the pull toward war, and we don’t have many off-ramps left.
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.
