(The Center Square)–The U.S. was no stranger to terror attacks before Sept. 11, 2001, both at home and abroad, but none shaped America and the world quite like the attacks on 9/11, which occurred 25 years ago Friday.
The Sept 11 attacks – in which 19 Islamic terrorists hiijacked four U.S. commercial planes, crashing them into both twin towers in New York City, the Pentagon and a Shanksville, Pennsylvania, field after passengers overtook the hijackers – caused the deaths of 2,996 people, including the terrorists.
Between the 1960s and 1970s, a leftist group, the Weather Underground, terrorized the U.S. government agencies, claiming credit for 25 bombings, including explosions at the U.S. State Department, U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the California Attorney General’s office and a New York City police station. No innocent people were killed in the attacks, while three of their members were killed in an accidental explosion in a New York City townhouse in 1970.
The 1980s saw a major uptick in Islamic-inspired terror attacks targeting Americans overseas, setting their sights on air travel, especially.
During the Lebanese Civil War, Hezbollah, a terror proxy of Iran, was responsible for the April 18, 1983, bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people and injuring 120.
The same year, the Marine Barracks in Beirut was attacked on Oct. 23, killing 242 and injuring 60 Americans. Up until the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Marine Barracks bombing stood as the deadliest terror attack against the U.S., and the deadliest single-death toll for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima during World War II in 1945.
A TWA flight flying from Rome to Athens was hijacked by two Hezbollah terrorists on June 14, 1985. One American hostage, a U.S. Navy sailor, Second Class Petty Officer Robert Stethem, was murdered.
A few years later, on April 14, 1988, a car-bomb exploded outside a USO club in Naples, Italy, killing one U.S. sailor, Third Class Petty Officer Angela Simone Santos, and injuring four other American sailors. The group, Jihad Brigades, claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the U.S. Department of State.
Later that year, on Dec. 21, a Pan American Airlines flight en route to New York City from London was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 190 Americans, with a total of 259 passengers on board and 11 on the ground. The Libyan government accepted responsibility for the bombing, according to the FBI.
On Feb. 26, 1993, a car bomb exploded in an underground garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six people and injuring 1,000 – the attack was carried out by Islamic terrorists led by Ramzi Yousef.
On April 19, 1995, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Okla., was destroyed when a moving truck, laced with explosives, blew up, killing 168 people, including 19 children, and injuring over 600. The attack carried out by American Timothy McVeigh, with the assistance of Terry Nichols, marked the worst act of homegrown terrorism in history.
The following year marked another deadly one for terrorism. On June 25, 1996, a truck bomb exploded outside the U.S. military’s Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The attack killed 19 U.S. service members, injuring 240 Americans. Investigators have pinned the attack on a Saudi branch of Hezbollah.
During the 1996 Summer Olympics hosted in Atlanta, Ga., on July 27, a bomb planted in Centennial Olympic Park exploded, killing one woman and injuring over 100 people. Over the next two years, bombs were planted outside two abortion clinics, one in Sandy Springs, Ga., and the other in Birmingham, Ala., in 1998, killing an off-duty Birmingham police officer, Robert Sanderson, and injuring one nurse. Eric Rudolph, an American, was ultimately found guilty of those attacks.
On Aug.7, 1998, a pair of explosions rocked two U.S. embassies in East Africa. The U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, was targeted by a bomb, killing 12 American citizens and injuring six. The attack itself killed 32 foreign service nationals and 247 Kenyans, while injuring 13 FSNs and approximately 5,000 Kenyans.
At the same time, an explosion rocked the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing seven FSNs, three Tanzanians, injuring one American, and injuring 76 Tanzanians. The U.S. government found Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda responsible for the dual attacks.
Less than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, on Oct. 12, 2000, the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer, was attacked when two suicide bombers pulled alongside the ship as it was refueling at a port in Aden, Yemen. The terrorist detonated the explosives, killing 17 American sailors and injuring nearly 40 crew members. Al-Qaeda was found responsible for the attack.
While the U.S. was no stranger to terror attacks before Sept. 11, 2001, the tragic events of that day shaped the overall political, security and cultural landscape of the U.S. more than two decades after the attacks.
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.
