(End of the American Dream)—Iran could end this war tomorrow if they truly wanted to do so. The Trump administration is more than willing to sit down and negotiate, and they have let the Iranians know that they are willing to make enormous concessions. But the lunatics that are running Iran are not interested. They truly believe that they are winning the war, and they are demanding that the U.S. must comply with every single one of the outrageous demands that they are making. If the Trump administration will not do this, the Iranians have warned that they will keep the Strait of Hormuz closed for Trump’s entire term, and that would put extreme pressure on the global economy. And now it appears that Iran is not content to just hold the global economy hostage. It is being reported that Iran has issued an absolutely shocking ultimatum to the United States. If the Trump administration does not agree to all of Iran’s demands in a matter of weeks, Iran will go on the offensive against the United States and Israel.
This is not just some random Internet rumor.
Reuters originally reported this story, and it apparently came directly from a “senior Iranian official”…
Iran has decided to shift its strategy in the conflict with the United States from a defensive posture to a “fully offensive” one and has given Washington several weeks to implement a memorandum of understanding between the two sides, a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Monday.
The warning marks a further escalation in Tehran’s rhetoric as a U.S. naval blockade squeezes Iran’s economy and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has slowed to a fraction of its prewar level.
This is an absolutely enormous story.
So why isn’t it getting a lot more attention?
According to this “senior Iranian official”, the United States will be given “a few weeks” to fulfill all of the obligations that it was supposed to meet under the infamous “Memorandum of Understanding”…
Iran has instead set a deadline of “a few weeks” for the United States to fully implement the memorandum, the official said. The precise timetable will be conveyed to Washington and regional governments through mediators.
If diplomacy fails, “all Iranian entities” will be prepared to escalate tensions in the Strait of Hormuz and across the region, the official said, adding that Iran would not wait indefinitely while the United States maintains its naval blockade.
Under Iran’s interpretation of the “Memorandum of Understanding”, the United States is required to pay 300 billion dollars in war reparations, arrange for the release of all frozen Iranian assets, permanently end the naval blockade, end fighting on all fronts, lift all sanctions and agree to permanent Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz…
That is quite a list of demands.
There is no way that President Trump will ever agree to all of that.
So there will be more war.
Brigadier General Yadollah Javani is another Iranian official that is warning that Iran’s posture is about to become more “offensive”…
Brig. Gen. Yadollah Javani, the political deputy of the IRGC, told Iran’s Fars News agency that the armed forces would adopt a “transformative” approach under its recently refreshed leadership, including a potential shift toward more offensive operations.
Javani said Iran had never initiated a war and that its actions to date had been defensive, but, “from now on, every action we take, although it has a defensive nature, must take on an offensive form.”
Apparently this has been in the works for quite some time.
According to the Wall Street Journal, when the “Memorandum of Understanding” was signed in June Iranian leaders immediately started preparing for “a bigger fight”…
After President Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran in mid-June, administration officials fanned out to build support for an agreement they hoped would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and start winding down the war.
Iran’s hard-line leaders huddled in Tehran and came up with a different plan, according to Iranian and Arab officials. In their view the pact was likely just an attempt by the U.S. and Israel to take pressure off the global economy and buy time for a bigger attack down the road. Instead of putting faith in talks, they took the past two months to prepare for a bigger fight.
In addition to preemptive missile and drone strikes, Iranian war plans reportedly include cutting undersea Internet cables and a potential ground operation in Kuwait by cutting across southern Iraq…
If Iranian troops actually enter Kuwait, there will be no turning back.
President Trump would feel compelled to commit U.S. ground forces, and things would get really crazy from that point forward.
Many were desperately hoping for some sort of a peace deal with Iran, but at this stage even Jared Kushner is publicly admitting that the Iranians “are not showing any interest in doing something that makes sense for us”…
Jared Kushner told Fox News on Monday that as the 60-day memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran expires, Iran doesn’t appear to be willing to finish the deal and give up nuclear weapons.
“[President Trump] is willing to make a deal that could be great for the Iranian people … but right now they are not showing any interest in doing something that makes sense for us,” Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser said in an interview with Fox News’ Trey Yingst.
Kushner said Iran has to be willing to make a fair deal without trying to “hide certain cards and get certain concessions.”
The Iranians are not going to compromise.
They have issued their list of demands, and they expect President Trump to comply.
There is no way that Trump will do that, and he just warned that Iran is “in big trouble”…
President Donald Trump said Monday he likes the idea of declaring the Strait of Hormuz U.S. territory, touting American control over the waterway while warning that Iran is “in big trouble.”
“We control it. We control it with the blockade. We have a blockade, we control it with the blockade. And I like the idea of declaring it a territory. We could do that,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
“We have total control over the strait now,” Trump said before stating that the Iranian military “can be a nuisance.”
In addition, Trump is also claiming that he will bomb Oman if they go along with Iran’s plan for the Strait of Hormuz…
President Donald Trump threatened military action against Oman, an ally of the United States, if its negotiations with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz interfere with U.S. efforts to reach a peace deal with Tehran.
“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s— out of them,” Trump told Fox News in an Aug. 17 phone interview, according to Trey Yingst, the network’s chief foreign correspondent who talked to the president.
Outside of talks with the United States, Iran has engaged in negotiations with Oman about reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which borders the two countries and both Iran and the United States have asserted control.
There isn’t going to be peace in the Middle East.
Those that believed that there would be were just deluding themselves.
If Iran chooses to go on the offensive against the United States and Israel, the entire region will erupt.
In such a scenario, both sides could go all the way up the escalation ladder very rapidly.
We really are living in extremely perilous times, and the world is simply not ready for what is about to happen next.
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.
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.
