As Donald Trump’s war on Iran nears the seven-month mark, the economic damage is reverberating all over the world, and all across the United States. Among the Americans who are feeling the most pain from a war their federal legislators never declared are the nation’s farmers, who are growing increasingly desperate under the weight of rising costs for diesel, fertilizer and equipment.

It’s a demographic that leans hard to the right, but now feels let down by Trump and others in Washington. “It’s his war that caused this, this war in Iran. We’re not winning that war. And many farmers feel like we shouldn’t be there,” farmer John Boyd, Jr told CNN. Trump says the war in Iran is necessary to prevent the country from building a nuclear weapon. However, going back to 2007 and up to the eve of the war, the US intelligence committee has repeatedly assessed that Iran was not building one. 

“I’ve done this 34 years. I have never worried and stressed like I have the last year,” North Carolina farmer Matt Bell told CBS News. “We’ve cut everything we can cut.” Trying every option he can think of to improve his cash flow, Bell has put off replacing equipment, produced some of his own fertilizer, and opened a pumpkin patch and hayride business for the fall. The rising costs come after a difficult period had already weakened his operation’s financial security. 

“The last several years in agriculture have been terrible, and we have just cut the fat anywhere we could. But we’re just getting to the point now there’s nothing left to cut. You cannot run without fuel. You cannot run without fertilizer. You have to have that,” Bell said. 

As a result of a major reduction in oil exports from the Persian Gulf, the nationwide average cost for a gallon of diesel hit $6.49 this week, up 75% from a year ago, according to the AAA. Lately, the price volatility has led Bell’s diesel distributors to offer price quotations that are only good for a matter of hours. He’d budgeted $35,000 for fuel in 2026, but blew past that number in August. “Every piece of equipment on this farm runs on diesel,” he emphasized. 

In an interview with Sky News, Texas cattle rancher Lynn Fleming said her August outlay for few was almost double what she’d paid in recent years. “Obviously the main [factor] is what we’re facing everyday with the Iranian situation,” Fleming said. Her husband, Robert, said he felt blindsided by the war. “We had no idea that he was going to pull the prank with the Strait of Hormuz. He didn’t tell us … he was going to go do the military maneuvers and try to control the oil supply over there. We had no warning of what was going to happen.” A major cornerstone of Trump’s 2024 campaign was his pledge to be a “peace president” who would refrain from starting any new wars.    

American farmer on Trump: “We had no idea the he was going to pull the prank with the Strait of Hormuz.. and try to control the oil supply. We had no warning of what was going to happen.” pic.twitter.com/u3IE50pEqn

— Molly Ploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) September 18, 2026

In addition to the war, Bell blames Trump’s tariff policies for boosting the prices of many of a farmer’s essentials. “Everything we’re touching, the fertilizer, fuel, chemicals, seed, parts — you know, the whole nine yards, everything that we touch has gone up,” he said.  

Cattle ranchers say they felt undercut by Trump’s decision to combat rising food prices by eliminating tariffs on imported beef — at a time when US ranchers were already under financial duress. “I’m already absorbing your high fuel prices that came out of nowhere,” South Texas rancher Josh Eilers told Sky. “It’s like, c’mon guys, just help me out a little bit. I just can’t keep absorbing more and more and more, or I simply won’t be able to afford to do this anymore.” 

“I’m paying $7 a gallon here for diesel fuel.”

“My combine holds 140 gallons.”

“That’s right at $1,000 to fill up my combine.”

For farmer John Boyd Jr., those numbers illustrate a much bigger problem in American agriculture.

Farmers are paying more for the fuel, fertilizer,… pic.twitter.com/lTesmNvLHW

— Farm Action (@FarmActionUS) September 16, 2026

“I do not want any American to feel sorry for the American farmer,” said Bell. “I want the Americans to be mad that we have been put in this situation. We’re fighting for survival and we’re running out of options… I am very mad. I think there’s been some very bad policy that’s been made that has led things to get to where we are.” 

Most of the farmers and ranchers quoted in this article say they voted for Trump. Their ire over the state of affairs is surely contributing to a major nationwide dip in Republican enthusiasm going into the midterms. Robert Fleming had this to say: “I’m afraid there’s going to be some changes made [in] voting. Maybe people not even voting, who knows, because a lot of the people feel like we the people are not being heard.” 

New York Assemblymember Alex Bores is launching a $30 million effort to unite Democrats behind a common artificial intelligence regulatory agenda ahead of the 2028 elections, taking the issue that defined his unsuccessful congressional campaign to a national stage.

His congressional run was bankrolled by Anthropic’s political money, a PAC funded with $20 million from the company and $401,250 from its employees, and his new group has not said who is funding it.

The organization, “Who Decides,” is launching Tuesday with Bores and his former chief of staff, Anna Myers, leading an effort to “build the winning Democratic answer to AI.” Its objective is to turn concerns about the technology into a shared platform for Democratic candidates, from presidential contenders to candidates further down the ballot.

“Who Decides’ goal is that by 2028, Democratic candidates from the top of the ticket on down run with a common AI safety agenda,” the group’s launch announcement states. “That means addressing the harms people already see and the broader danger that increasingly powerful and out-of-control systems could destabilize our economy, our democracy, and our safety.”

The group plans to concentrate on 11 states it identifies as important to the 2028 presidential primary and general election: South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Its plans include quarterly state and national polling, national conferences and partnerships with local organizations, Politico reports.

Those partnerships would bring together labor unions, parents, educators, civil-rights organizations, faith groups and other constituencies. The organization says it will work with those groups to develop AI policy positions and put them before candidates through questionnaires, forums, endorsements and briefings.

“We don’t let five people write the laws for hundreds of millions of Americans,” Bores says in the announcement, referring to the concentration of decision-making among AI executives. “There is no reason to let them write the rules for AI.”

An Organizing Push Ahead Of 2028

The launch follows a series of warnings from within the AI industry and competing political responses over how aggressively Washington should intervene. Former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon warned last week that increasingly powerful AI could threaten humanity. Leaders at Anthropic and OpenAI subsequently called for slowing development so safety measures could keep pace.

Former President Barack Obama has urged Democrats to make AI a central political issue, with plans addressing both safety and the technology’s economic consequences. His comments included a call for the party’s 2028 presidential candidates to focus on the issue.

The launch comes days after AI techbros agreed that a ‘pause’ in development was needed along with new oversight (something Beijing won’t agree to). In a Saturday essay which set off the calls to slow down, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposes governance that lives largely inside the industry: third-party evaluators embedded in the labs on terms the labs set, with the right to publish their findings; coordination among frontier companies on safety standards, enabled by a narrow antitrust waiver from Washington; and, only later, agreements with foreign governments. He calls federal regulation of every frontier lab the most effective approach but argues that passing laws takes time. Who Decides starts from the premise that “a few executives inside a handful of companies are making all the decisions,” and it refuses their money. The two efforts want many of the same rules, including published safety plans, incident reporting and independent testing of frontier models, and disagree about who should write them and how soon. The industry’s safety wing has already bet on Bores once: Public First Action, a PAC funded by a $20 million Anthropic donation, spent $450,000 supporting him in the primary.

President Trump pushed in the opposite direction Monday, rejecting calls for additional restrictions and arguing that existing government powers were sufficient. He also warned that slowing American development could benefit China.

Incest Is Best?

Bores’ new group grew out of a campaign funded by Amodei’s network – which runs through Effective altruism. The same network produced METR, the evaluator Amodei’s essay names as his preferred watchdog – which itself was bankrolled largely by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Its most famous adherent, Sam Bankman-Fried, is in prison for fraud, and his $500 million stake in Anthropic, bought in 2022 with FTX customer funds, was liquidated in the exchange’s bankruptcy. Anthropic grew up inside that world: Moskovitz and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn funded its early rounds; Dario Amodei was an early signer of the movement’s giving pledge; his sister and co-founder Daniela is married to Holden Karnofsky, the Open Philanthropy co-founder who joined Anthropic last year; and the trust with power over the company’s board includes the CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism.

Bores’ new group grew out of a campaign funded by Amodei’s network – which runs through effective altruism, a left-wing ‘movement’ that began with global poverty and animal welfare, preaches earning as much as possible in order to give it away, and over the past decade made preventing an AI catastrophe its central cause, bankrolled largely by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. The same network produced METR, the evaluator Amodei’s essay names as his preferred watchdog. The movement’s most famous adherent, Sam Bankman-Fried, is in prison for fraud, and his $500 million stake in Anthropic, bought in 2022 with what prosecutors said were FTX customer funds, was liquidated in the exchange’s bankruptcy. Anthropic grew up inside that world: Moskovitz and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn funded its early rounds; Dario Amodei was an early signer of the movement’s giving pledge; his sister and co-founder Daniela is married to Holden Karnofsky, the Open Philanthropy co-founder who joined Anthropic last year; and the trust with power over the company’s board includes the CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism.

The same network reached Bores. Anthropic’s $20 million gift to Public First Action, which backed him, sits alongside $401,250 that Anthropic employees gave to campaigns supporting him. Who Decides’ pledge bans frontier-lab executives and corporate money – but doesn’t bar the philanthropies that fund the AI-safety field. The group won’t say who supplied the $10 million it has reportedly raised. The movement has tried electoral politics before: in 2022, Bankman-Fried’s super PAC spent more than $10 million on Carrick Flynn’s House primary in Oregon (which Flynn lost). 

Who Decides, meanwhile, is calling for an AI agenda that a future Democratic president could act on during the first 100 days in office.

From A Congressional Defeat To A National Campaign

Bores made AI regulation a central issue in his congressional primary campaign after helping pass New York’s RAISE Act. The legislation requires major frontier AI developers to publish safety plans and report critical safety incidents. Although he lost the primary, Bores and Myers describe the campaign as the foundation for their new organization.

“The lesson Bores and Myers took from those fights was that confronting the AI industry is fertile political ground and that public demand for answers on AI policy exists but remains scattered,” the announcement states.

The organization says it will reject “corporate money or contributions from senior executives at frontier AI companies.” Its website directs prospective donors to a Givebutter fundraising page.

The $30 million figure refers to the overall effort, rather than an established amount already raised. A New York Times report summarized by Techmeme says the nonprofit has raised $10 million and plans to seek another $20 million in 2027.

For Bores and Myers, the stated task is to turn separate concerns about AI into a coordinated political program.

“What’s missing is a coalition capable of turning that energy into a governing consensus before the technology, the economic dislocation, and the partisan battle lines harden,” the launch announcement says.

By Michael Kern of OilPrice.com

The surge in wholesale natural gas prices is set to pass through the retail and electricity inflation in the Eurozone faster than in the past, the European Central Bank (ECB) said in its Economic Bulletin on Monday.

While the pass-through is faster and can manifest in the inflation numbers within one to three months for most Eurozone members, the pressure on electricity prices has been lower so far in 2026 compared to 2022, partly due to the higher shares of electricity generated from renewables, the ECB’s economists wrote.

“The impact of wholesale gas prices on wholesale electricity prices – which is typically strong with gas prices being the marginal price-setter for electricity prices – was dampened by a shift towards electricity generated from renewables,” they noted.

Natural gas prices have doubled since the start of the conflict in the Middle East, while oil prices have increased more modestly, by about 40%.

For Europe, soaring energy prices have rekindled inflation fears in Europe mostly due to the spike in wholesale gas prices.

The Iran war and the intensified competition for spot LNG supply from Asia came just as Europe was trying to build in the spring and summer natural gas inventories for winter.

The ECB, which in June raised the key interest rate for the euro area for the first time since 2023, raised the rates once again in September, by 0.25 percentage points, as inflation at over 3% is running well above the long-term ECB policy target of 2%.

“The outlook remains highly uncertain, with risks to the upside for inflation and to the downside for economic growth,” the ECB said in its monetary policy decision on September 10, the day on which Saudi Arabia’s onshore oil pipeline that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz was attacked with drones.

“The pass-through of wholesale prices to retail prices has sped up for gas prices overall, but the broad pattern of lagged and uneven transmission remains for both gas prices and electricity prices,” the ECB economists said today.

An ECB survey of central banks in the Eurozone showed that changes in wholesale gas prices are expected to be passed on to consumer gas inflation within 1-3 months in more than half of the euro area, within 4-6 months in around one-tenth of the euro area, and within 7-12 months in around one-third of the euro area – all higher than in 2022.

“Notably, the share of countries to report a slow pass-through within 13-24 months has decreased from around 40% to around 5% since 2022,” the ECB noted.

The Nuclear Energy Institute’s (NEI) newly released 2026 Future of Nuclear Power survey captured American nuclear energy ambitions across 21 utility companies covering 95 commercial reactors. Reactor owners find themselves planning new reactors to meet the AI-juiced electricity demand of the future, along with the added demand from increased domestic manufacturing and electrification.

More than 97% of the units surveyed are considering or pursuing approval to operate for at least 80 years. It goes to highlight the long lifespan of reactor plants, with some owners now planning for operations out to 100 years from initial construction. 

NEI estimates that uprates, restarts, longer refueling cycles, and other improvements could collectively add more than 7 GW of nuclear generation from the existing fleet over the coming decade. That’s more than the power you would get by building six new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors.

That includes roughly 2.2 GW from restarting the previously shutdown plants at Palisades, Three Mile Island, and Duane Arnold.

Between the 21 utilities surveyed, the report states those companies are planning for 33.6 GW of new nuclear generation over the next 15 years. Roughly 28 of those GWs are concentrated in 2035-2039.

New capacity is broadly split between large reactors and small modular reactors, while respondents reported no microreactor plans.

As we noted when covering The Nuclear Company’s South Carolina reactor plans, America’s “nuclear renaissance” still has to make the transition from announcements to actual construction.

Interest in supplying power to specific loads sheds some light on what the utilities are looking at powering with their growing nuclear ambitions. Over a dozen respondents are looking to provide energy for data centers. However, this is the first year that has seen zero interest in powering hydrogen generation plants.

2024 saw about a dozen respondents interested in behind the meter setups for powering hydrogen production facilities. After Congress changed up the tax credits for hydrogen applications to expire in 2028, interest from the utilities dropped down to only three respondents in 2025, leading to zero for this year.

Despite the incredibly rosy future being painted by the nuclear segments of America’s utilities, the stock market holds a different opinion on the nuclear sector’s constituents.

With SPY up about 12% this year and XLE up over 40%, the nuclear sector has trailed behind significantly. Of the three main nuclear-themed ETFs, none of them currently hold positive returns since the beginning of the year.

The uranium-heavy URA and the industrial/services-heavy NUKZ are down about 2-3%, while the more concentrated NLR is down about 13% YTD.

After multiple reactor developers, including Oklo and NuScale, had explosive runs in 2024 and 2025, multiple names in the nuclear corner have fallen over 50% in recent months as the nuclear theme is still tightly tied to the momentum and AI infrastructure trade.

The sector has a chance of being taken more seriously if grid-scale construction can finally start getting announced at scale, but for now, everything still seems to be in the talking stage, which is exciting absolutely no one.

The microreactor space has seen an increase in interest on the private side, with recent funding rounds for microreactor developers pushing over $1 billion. These reactors have some different application opportunities outside of the scope of traditional utilities, such as national defense applications and remote community power. 

As we’ve detailed at length with the DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program, this class of reactor capacity is actually showing tangible progress towards commercialization.

Authored by José Niño via The Libertarian Institute

On January 22, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld stepped behind the podium at the Foreign Press Center in Washington and, with one answer to a Dutch public television reporter, redrew the map of Europe. The reporter wanted to know why so many Europeans trusted Saddam Hussein more than then-President George W. Bush. The defense secretary fired back with words the Pentagon transcript preserved in full:

“Now, you’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. And there are a lot of new members.”

Rumsfeld kept going. “Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem.” When the reporter cited public opinion, he refused to budge. “But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe. They’re not with France and Germany on this, they’re with the United States.”

Berlin and Paris erupted in response. The transcript shows Rumsfeld never spoke the words “new Europe,” yet headlines supplied them within hours, and Radio Free Europe conceded that his underlying point about a split continent held up. A year later in Munich, he told reporters he felt too old for regretting his comments at the time.

The Iraq showdown gave the phrase its teeth. France and Germany, backed by Russia, wanted inspectors to keep working, and Paris threatened to veto a second war resolution at the United Nations. On January 30, 2003, the leaders of Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic answered with the “Letter of Eight,” a joint commentary urging unity against Baghdad. Six days later, foreign ministers from the Vilnius Ten, a bloc stretching from Albania to the Baltics, endorsed what they called Secretary of State Colin Powell’s “compelling evidence” and demanded “a united response from the community of democracies.”

Washington repaid the loyalty. On May 8, 2003, the Senate voted 96 to 0 to admit Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia while their foreign ministers watched from the balcony. The Senate’s own ratification resolution cited their February 5 statement on Iraq. All seven entered NATO in 2004, bringing three former Soviet republics into the alliance for the first time.

Troops trailed the rhetoric. On August 16, 2004, the Bush White House announced a posture overhaul that would bring home “about 60,000 to 70,000 uniformed personnel” over a decade and ship heavy Cold War forces out of Germany. Romania signed a defense cooperation agreement in 2005, and Bulgaria followed in 2006, opening Mihail Kogalniceanu, Novo Selo, and Bezmer to rotating American units. At Bucharest in 2008, Bush pressed allies to declare that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” Russia later went to war with Georgia that August.

Every president since has pushed the line east. Barack Obama canceled Bush’s Polish interceptor plan in 2009 but substituted a phased shield whose Romanian base at Deveselu went operational in May 2016. After Crimea joined the Russian Federation, NATO stationed four multinational battlegroups in the Baltic states and Poland, with Americans leading the Polish unit. Donald Trump’s first administration quit the INF Treaty in August 2019, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that “Russia is solely responsible for the treaty’s demise.” A 2020 pact with Warsaw produced a forward headquarters for V Corps in Poznan.

President Joe Biden hardened the frontier further. After February 2022, American forces in Europe swelled to roughly 100,000, congressional researchers noted. The Army opened its first permanent garrison in Poland in March 2023, and NATO declared the Aegis Ashore interceptor site at Redzikowo mission ready in July 2024.

Esteemed diplomat George Kennan saw where this road led. Reacting in 1998 to the first round of enlargement, the father of containment told Thomas Friedman, “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else,” as The American Conservative recounted.

Donald Trump’s second term scrambled the script. In October 2025, the Pentagon sent a 101st Airborne brigade home from Romania without a replacement, leaving about 1,000 Americans in the country. U.S. Army Europe and Africa insisted the move was “not an American withdrawal from Europe or a signal of lessened commitment to NATO and Article 5” but “a positive sign of increased European capability and responsibility.” Armed Services Chairmen Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) fired back that the decision “appears uncoordinated and directly at odds with the President’s strategy.”

Then Trump feuded with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the Iran war. On May 1, 2026, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced, “The Secretary of War has ordered the withdrawal of approximately 5,000 troops from Germany.” Defense officials told CBS the missile battalion slated for Germany would go elsewhere. Three weeks later, Trump rewarded Warsaw instead. “Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who I was proud to Endorse, and our relationship with him, I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland,” he wrote. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski suggested the move would simply hold American numbers near previous levels.

Punish old Europe, reward new Europe. Rumsfeld would recognize the playbook.

Ukraine will decide how far that playbook runs. In July 2026, Thomas Graham of the Council on Foreign Relations outlined a plausible settlement built on a ceasefire along the front, Western security ties for Kiev without NATO membership, and an end to further eastward enlargement, terms Moscow could market as victory. Graham warned against assuming the tide favors Kiev. Bloomberg sources reported that Vladimir Putin wants the rest of Donbas before serious talks, and envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner left Moscow in September without a breakthrough.

Suppose Russia keeps its conquests at a ruinous price. A pyrrhic win of that kind would shut NATO’s door to new members, and Washington’s national security class would likely respond as it did in 2003, by pouring money and manpower into the eastern allies it already has. The scaffolding survives every Trump trim. Allies have pledged 5% of GDP on defense by 2035, and a CRS report counted about 86,000 U.S. personnel in European NATO countries as of March 2026, with Congress requiring certification before numbers fall below 76,000.

Once Trump exits, the hawks who blasted his Romania cut will still hold the blueprints and the bases. They may well revive Rumsfeld’s New Europe as a permanent front against Moscow, anchored in Poland, Romania, and the Baltics. Kennan warned that such a posture breeds the hostility it claims to deter. Americans deserve a debate before Washington signs them up for another generation of geopolitical tension with the Russian Bear.

Houthi officials have put Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan on notice amid the ongoing Saudi-Yemen conflict, and as Riyadh urges partners to assist militarily against the Ansar Allah movement. Iran’s state Nour News, which is affiliated with the country’s Supreme National Security Council, has issued a report saying the three Saudi allies “will likely be targeted in the next stages”
 – per a Houthi official.

The Houthi official warned that “The targeting of Iran by the enemies will not be limited to the country’s borders and, according to him, the next efforts will be to target Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan.“

Already the Houthis have launched several attacks on Saudi Aramco facilities, also including fuel depots next to Riyadh’s international airport. The Houthis subsequently confirmed sending ballistic missiles on the capital, in a first of the war. This happened Friday night into Saturday.

According to more from the Iranian media report:

Referring to the position of these three countries in the Islamic world, he said that their power and influence could be an obstacle to the Zionist regime’s plans. The Ansarullah official stated that this plan is based on pushing Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan towards wars and internal conflicts, and that Saudi Arabia plays a role in this process. According to him, such a situation could lead to the erosion of capabilities, weakening, and disintegration of the internal social fabric of these countries

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was just in Cairo meeting with Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. The visit came just in the wake of an Iranian-backed militia attack on the key Saudi East-West pipeline, which one US official described as having been launched from Iraq.

A big focus of the MbS-Sisi meeting was regional security. The Saudis have been asking all regional allies for support at a moment the internationally recognized Sanaa government is rapidly losing ground to the Houthis.

Washington has appeared to shrug its shoulders, staying on the sidelines thus far. President Trump was reported ready to pull the trigger against the Houthis but reportedly TACO’d by close of the weekend.

But there’s even greater pressure on the Pakistanis and Turks to take action, given the recently signed Mecca Defense Pact. We featured the following commentary last week:

Turkey’s new commitments to Saudi Arabia under the Mecca defence pact could increase the risk of Ankara being drawn into a confrontation with Yemen’s Houthis, a development that could have significant consequences for Turkish supply lines to the Horn of Africa. Although Turkey has yet to ratify the pact, expected in October, continued Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia, and Ankara’s recent participation in the Saudi-led Multinational Maritime Defense Alliance make some form of confrontation possible.

Another big, obvious risk includes the whole thing spinning out into a full-on regional war, which would likely further fuel US-Iran confrontation, and possibly bring in the Israelis.

Bigger conflict would also likely close Red Sea shipping. The Houthis have so far only declared the Bab Al-Mandab Strait off limits to Saudi and Israeli-linked ships. But the fear is that any moment the group could begin assaults on all international shipping, akin to the ongoing crisis in the Strait of Hormuz.

Even very good reporting on Saudi-Houthi situation often says the Houthis e.g. “reignited” the war this summer, or some such. But this July, Saudi struck airport in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, to block an Iranian plane from landing. Sometimes that’s not even mentioned…

— Andrew Day (@AKDay89) September 21, 2026

The Iranians and Houthis know they hold this card, and are likely intentionally slow-playing their leverage, but ready to pull the trigger on the next potential round of escalation with the US-Saudi-Israeli axis.

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

Revenge is sweet. It tastes all the sweeter the longer one has had to wait for it to arrive, and the deeper the pain of the humiliation that preceded it.

Some may still have the images of the great debt crisis of a decade and a half ago before their eyes: German politicians, led by then-Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, traveled to Athens at regular intervals to make sure everything was in order. Greece, the supposed sinner of the debt crisis, had gone off the rails, accumulated too much debt and was quickly made the scapegoat for the financial-market and sovereign-debt crisis. It was convenient – because it diverted attention from Germany’s own failures.

That someone had apparently left a score to settle was made clear by Greek Finance Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis in an interview with Handelsblatt on Monday. When the conversation turned to the debt question, Pierrakakis, who also serves as president of the Eurogroup, noted that reforms in fiscal policy might be painful at first, but would ultimately pay off politically and economically.

The man is right. And Berlin should listen to him, because the debt club around Friedrich Merz is knowingly driving the budget into the wall with new borrowing of more than 5 percent next year.

It really does sound like an open score to settle when the Greek generously praises Germany’s economic potential in flowery language while at the same time noting that the country is not untouchable: “Germany is the industrial locomotive of Europe” — Pierrakakis is mercilessly putting his finger on the wound. For he cannot have failed to notice how rapidly the country is economically destroying itself, how quickly it is deindustrializing in the grip of climate fanaticism and mutating from a nation of tinkerers and engineers into an open-air institution for moralists and degrowth ideologues.

While Germany has embarked on the road to second-class status, Greece is gradually growing out of its permanent crisis. The problem with the local economy remains the euro: The Greeks actually need a significantly devalued currency in order to compete more effectively on international markets. After the introduction of the euro and the cheaper borrowing costs made possible by Germany’s credit anchor, the country slipped into an artificial debt trap — the land of spendthrifts and pleasure-seekers, according to the ugly narrative.

German banks and insurers had invested as much as 45 billion euros in Greek bonds at the time — money for which German taxpayers ultimately had to foot the bill. Distorted interest rates caused by the introduction of the euro and the euro debt club’s highly heterogeneous economies were bound to produce such a disaster — and the next debacle is already taking shape: Debt is rising everywhere, while interest rates are climbing. The bond market is responding by selling government bonds, thereby driving up the cost of servicing debt through higher interest rates.

Were Greece’s efforts toward austerity and thrift ultimately in vain?

Whether the moment of the great debt reckoning has now arrived is rather unlikely — there is still plenty of room to push the sovereign-debt crisis to the point of rupture. Nevertheless, much is reminiscent of the period 15 years ago, when the bond market reacted in a similar way and the U.S. housing crisis spread through the market mechanism to the fragile European sovereign-bond markets. Greece, the EU’s smallest economy with the highest level of government debt, was hit first before the dominoes began to fall.

Schäuble’s Greek counterpart at the time was Giannis Varoufakis: an intellectual, committed socialist who stood up to the Teutons and the Troika of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission — until his party Syriza and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras were brought to their knees.

The consequence: austerity policy. Massive pension cuts, hospital closures — the shrinking of the welfare state. The Greeks experienced their social-policy Waterloo and have since managed to reduce their government debt ratio from the peak of the crisis, around 180 percent, to 146 percent.

Chapeau! The Greeks deserve every bit of respect in the face of the lax fiscal policies all around them — whether in Italy, Germany, France or Spain. Athens is staying the course, voting conservatively and struggling through this painful period of adjustment.

In the Handelsblatt interview, Pierrakakis becomes something of a fiscal-policy armchair philosopher: The cost of doing nothing, he says, is ultimately higher for everyone than the cost of reforms. That may be true. But the lesson contains a kernel of truth that will not move the German governing coalition even a millimeter toward the mountain of necessary reforms growing larger by the day.

Because consolidating this year’s 180-billion-euro deficit-ridden chaos budget would imply corresponding spending cuts. Tax increases would strangle the economy — Germany would have to begin with remigration, end development aid, reform the welfare state and seriously consider what to do about the war with Russia and the massive military buildup it entails.

The pain of austerity is still ahead for the Germans. Whether it is brought about through the bond market or through the harsh cuts of a reform government makes no difference.

All in all, it was a memorable interview because it describes Germany’s changing era from the perspective of the underdog. Above all, Pierrakakis’ remark that Germany has economic potential should resonate for a long time in its ironic sharpness. Because the country has overstretched its public finances and now lives on credit — just as the Greeks once did.

* * * 

About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a graduate economist, has worked for or over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.

Authored by Milan Adams via Preppgroup,

The shift happened gradually, then all at once.

By late 2024, analysts at Langley and Fort Meade who had spent careers tracking terrorist cells and nuclear programs found themselves redirected to spreadsheets showing fertilizer shipments, satellite passes over Ukrainian wheat fields, and soil moisture readings from the Sahel. Nobody had issued a memo announcing the change.

It simply became obvious that agricultural data had become national security data, and that the old distinctions between threats to the state and threats to the food supply had collapsed into a single, uncomfortable reality.

The numbers they confronted were not abstract. 266 million people facing crisis-level hunger or worse – not “food insecurity” as bureaucrats define it, the anxiety of choosing between rent and groceries, but the physiological reality of bodies consuming muscle tissue to keep hearts beating. 1.9 million perched on the absolute edge of famine, the IPC Phase 5 designation that translates, in plain language, to mass death. These figures accumulated across six consecutive years of escalating hunger, each emergency layering atop the last until the system began to resemble geological strata of suffering.

Then came the confirmations that turned statistical tragedy into historical rupture. In 2025, for the first time in the twenty-first century, two simultaneous famines achieved formal verification. Gaza and Sudan – regions separated by thousands of miles but united in the mechanics of collapse – entered what the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification calls “catastrophic” conditions. This means households have exhausted every coping mechanism. Assets sold. Wild foods consumed. Migration attempted, often failed. The stage before mortality curves spike.

Intelligence agencies do not typically concern themselves with crop yields. Their mandate runs toward adversaries with intentions and capabilities: states, terrorist organizations, criminal networks. But by early 2025, the distinction between traditional security threats and agricultural data had dissolved. The Director of National Intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment, typically reserved for cyber warfare and nuclear proliferation, dedicated unprecedented space to “food system fragility” as a destabilizing force with implications exceeding regional conflicts.

The logic was straightforward, once you looked at it. Civilizations do not tolerate starvation passively. The 2011 Arab Spring erupted partly from wheat price spikes. The Syrian civil war’s origins traced partially to drought-induced rural migration overwhelming urban infrastructure. When 266 million people face acute food insecurity, the number of potential failed states multiplies. Analysts began modeling scenarios where famine drove migration flows that overwhelmed border security, where desperate populations radicalized or simply marched, where governments fell and weapons stockpiles dispersed into anarchic spaces.

The assessments grew darker as 2025 progressed. Satellite imagery revealed anomalies first. Ukrainian wheat fields showed reduced planting density despite marginal territorial gains. Argentine growing regions displayed parched soil patterns invisible from ground level but unmistakable from orbit. The Sahel’s marginal agricultural zones retreated further as fertilizer shipments – delayed by shipping disruptions and currency collapses – simply never arrived. Each failed planting season represented a debt against future harvests that could not be repaid.

The fertilizer crisis provided the mechanism for systemic failure. Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium – the triad of industrial agriculture – had experienced price trajectories that defied market correction. Urea prices in the Middle East remained between seventy-five and one hundred eight percent above pre-conflict baselines. Natural gas, the feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer production, had grown volatile. Farmers in developing regions faced a brutal choice: purchase reduced quantities of fertilizer, or abandon planting entirely. Many chose reduction, gambling that diminished yields exceeded no yields at all.

Soil chemistry does not negotiate. The Council on Foreign Relations noted what agronomists understood but policymakers ignored: soil holds phosphate reserves sufficient to absorb one season of deprivation, perhaps two. Beyond that, yield depression accelerates non-linearly. Reduced nitrogen application could compress yields for certain crops by fifty percent within a single growing season. The human stomach makes no distinction between geopolitical causes and agricultural effects. It registers only absence.

Humanitarian funding collapsed precisely when requirements peaked. The $37 billion allocated globally for food assistance in 2024 – a figure already insufficient – plummeted to $21 billion in 2025 as donor fatigue intersected with domestic economic pressures in wealthy nations. The World Food Programme, which had prevented famines through sheer logistical determination in previous decades, found itself choosing which populations to abandon. The $16.9 billion required to address the most acute crises represented less than three days of global military expenditure, yet remained unattainable.

Grain reserves – the buffer against harvest failure that civilization has maintained since Pharaoh’s dreams – had eroded to levels unseen in decades. Global wheat ending stocks for 2024/25 reached 257 million metric tons, a nine-year low and declining. Corn stocks followed similar trajectories. The stock-to-use ratio, indicating how many days of consumption existing reserves could cover, had compressed dangerously. Previous generations maintained reserves sufficient for multiple growing seasons. Contemporary just-in-time agriculture had reduced this margin to months, then weeks.

The geography of vulnerability concentrated in patterns that analysts could map but not prevent. Six nations faced the highest risk of famine or catastrophic hunger as 2025 closed: Sudan, Palestine, South Sudan, Mali, Haiti, Yemen. These were not accidents of weather or bad policy alone. They represented the intersection of conflict, climate stress, and economic collapse – the triad that assessments identified as the new normal. Sudan’s conflict destroyed not just this season’s harvest but the seed stock and agricultural infrastructure required for future planting. Gaza’s siege compressed centuries of agricultural decline into months. Haiti’s gangs controlled food distribution as effectively as any medieval siege.

Climate data completed the picture. The 2024-2025 El Niño event disrupted monsoon patterns across South Asia and East Africa. Drought in the Horn of Africa persisted into its sixth year in some regions, exhausting pastoralist strategies developed over millennia. Meanwhile, flash floods destroyed standing crops in Pakistan, Brazil, Libya. The weather had become not merely unpredictable but actively hostile, each season bringing some new permutation of extremity that agricultural systems – optimized for twentieth-century climate stability – could not absorb.

Analysts began employing vocabulary previously reserved for nuclear scenarios. “Cascading failures.” “Systemic risk.” “Irreversible tipping points.” The food system they observed had evolved for efficiency and profit margins, not resilience. Global supply chains assumed continuous functionality of shipping lanes, stable energy prices, peaceful trade routes. When these assumptions failed simultaneously, as they did in 2024-2025, the system lacked redundancy. There was no backup plan beyond hoping that next year’s harvest would compensate.

The psychological impact within the intelligence community itself proved noteworthy. Analysts accustomed to studying deliberate threats – enemy actions, terrorist plots, state aggression – confronted a different category of horror: structural inevitability. No amount of drone strikes could restore soil nutrients. No sanctions could compel rain. The famine approaching was not an attack to be thwarted but a physical process to be witnessed, documented, mitigated at the margins.

By mid-2025, classified briefings included projections that would have seemed fantastical five years earlier. Scenarios where multiple breadbasket regions experienced simultaneous harvest failures. Models of migration flows numbering tens of millions. Assessments of which governments could withstand food price spikes of three hundred percent, five hundred percent, a thousand percent. The answers were not reassuring. Modern states rest upon implicit contracts wherein populations accept governance in exchange for basic provisioning. When that provisioning fails, legitimacy evaporates faster than grain silos empty.

Agricultural scientists had warned for decades. The “Green Revolution” that fed billions relied on fossil fuel inputs, aquifer depletion, crop genetic uniformity that maximized yield while minimizing resilience. Each season of intensive cultivation mined soil organic matter that required centuries to accumulate. Each monoculture planting expanded territory available to pests and pathogens. The system worked until it didn’t. By 2025, the “didn’t” had arrived.

What distinguishes the current crisis from historical famines is not the suffering – human beings have starved in uncountable millions throughout history – but the impossibility of remedy. The 1845 Irish Potato Famine killed one million because the potato crop failed; grain continued flowing from Ireland to England throughout. The 1959-1961 Chinese famine resulted from policy decisions that could theoretically have been reversed. Today’s crisis emerges from global systems so complex and interdependent that no single actor controls them, yet no local community escapes their failure. You cannot plant your way out of fertilizer shortages when Haber-Bosch plants require natural gas you cannot afford. You cannot irrigate through drought when aquifers have been pumped dry. You cannot import grain when exporting nations have banned shipments to protect their own populations.

The assessments reportedly concluded with recommendations that bordered on existential. Prioritize stability in nuclear-armed states facing food stress – Pakistan, India, China – regardless of other policy considerations. Prepare for migration flows that would make the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis appear trivial. Accept that certain regions would experience demographic collapse regardless of intervention. This language – sacrifice, triage, strategic abandonment – had not appeared in food security discussions since the Cold War’s darkest scenarios. Its reemergence signaled recognition that the present crisis exceeded the framework of humanitarian assistance. It had entered the realm of national security survival.

The 2026 projections, finalized in classified channels during autumn 2025, offered no reprieve. Even assuming average weather – a generous assumption – global grain production would remain below consumption requirements. Stock-to-use ratios would compress further. Prices would rise sufficiently to trigger the political instability that agencies most feared. The “best case” scenarios assumed successful harvests in multiple regions simultaneously, a statistical improbability given recent patterns. The worst cases assumed “compound events” – drought in one breadbasket, flood in another, heat stress in a third – occurring within the same growing season.

Such compound events had occurred before. The 2010 Russian heat wave destroyed one-third of that nation’s wheat crop and triggered export bans that contributed to Arab Spring uprisings. The difference in 2025 was systemic vulnerability. In 2010, global reserves could absorb regional failures. In 2025, reserves had been consumed by successive years of deficit. The buffer was gone. Each regional failure would transmit directly to global markets as price spikes, and to vulnerable populations as hunger.

The table tells a story that prose cannot compress. Each percentage point represents millions of human lives suspended over an abyss. The negative correlations – funding down, need up, reserves depleted, prices soaring – create a vise from which extraction seems impossible. Intelligence analysts deal in probabilities, but by late 2025, the scenario tree had pruned itself to variations of catastrophe.

What the public received were sanitized versions. Press releases about “food security challenges” and “need for increased humanitarian assistance.” The classified assessments, leaked in fragments, contained starker language. References to “civilizational stress tests” and “historical inflection points.” Comparisons to the fourteenth century’s combination of climate deterioration, pandemic, and systemic collapse. Hyperbole, some said. Historical analogy, others countered. The analysts themselves reportedly requested classification upgrades, not to protect sources and methods, but because they feared the political and social consequences of public comprehension.

For comprehension breeds panic, and panic accelerates collapse. When populations understand that grain reserves measure in weeks rather than years, hoarding becomes rational. When farmers realize fertilizer will remain unavailable, they plant less. When governments accept that famine is inevitable, they prioritize regime survival over population welfare. The intelligence community thus faced a paradox: warning loudly enough to motivate action risked triggering the very dynamics that would ensure failure. Warning quietly accomplished nothing.

The 2025 harvests confirmed the modeling. Ukrainian wheat production fell below pre-invasion levels despite territorial gains, because the agricultural labor force had been mobilized, killed, or displaced. Argentine soybeans suffered from drought that irrigation could not mitigate. Australian wheat faced quality downgrades from unseasonable rains during harvest. Each regional failure subtracted from a global balance already overdrawn. The world consumed more grain than it produced in 2024, and again in 2025, drawing down reserves that could not be replenished.

Fertilizer industry executives spoke in private what they dared not announce publicly. The CEO of Yara International, one of the world’s largest nitrogen fertilizer producers, reportedly warned that sustained crisis conditions could eliminate ten billion meals per week globally. Ten billion. The number exceeds comprehension until one realizes it represents the caloric foundation for three billion human beings. Remove those meals, and the biological mathematics become inexorable. The body requires approximately 2,000 calories daily for sedentary survival. Below 1,200, organ damage begins. Below 800, mortality becomes probable within months. The hunger margin – the gap between available calories and required calories – had turned negative for hundreds of millions.

What happens when the assessments prove correct is not yet fully visible. History suggests that famine does not produce uniform outcomes. Some societies fragment into violence; others achieve surprising solidarity. Some governments fall; others consolidate authoritarian control over remaining resources. The variables include not just food availability but pre-existing social capital, institutional legitimacy, and the presence or absence of external intervention.

What seems predictable is the silence that precedes recognition. The period when data accumulate but public consciousness has not yet shifted. When grain traders know what consumers do not. When analysts draft reports that policymakers hope to address through incremental measures. When the physics of soil and climate proceed indifferent to human urgency.

This silence characterized 2024 and 2025. The information was available. The Global Report on Food Crises published its findings openly. Agricultural commodity markets reflected scarcity in their price structures. Climate scientists documented the anomalies. Yet the public discourse in wealthy nations remained fixated on other concerns – political scandals, cultural conflicts, technological distractions – while the foundation eroded.

The silence breaks eventually. It breaks when food prices in developed nations spike sufficiently to affect middle-class budgets. When migration pressures overwhelm border infrastructure. When media attention finally focuses on emaciated populations in ways that cannot be ignored. By then, the dynamics have acquired momentum that policy cannot easily arrest. Famine operates on biological timelines – caloric deficits accumulate, immune systems weaken, mortality rises – that do not pause for political deliberation.

The Margin Has Closed

Intelligence agencies prepare for this breaking point because it is their function to anticipate rather than react. They model the scenarios, identify the triggers, recommend the interventions that might – might – mitigate the worst outcomes. But they cannot manufacture rainfall, synthesize fertilizer without feedstock, or force populations to consume less so that others might survive. They operate within constraints that physics and chemistry impose.

The “worst food catastrophe in human history” is not hyperbole if measured by absolute numbers at risk. Previous famines killed millions, but involved populations measured in tens or hundreds of millions. The current crisis threatens hundreds of millions directly, and billions indirectly through price spikes, economic collapse, contagion effects. The scale is unprecedented because the global population is unprecedented, because the integration of food systems is unprecedented, and because the environmental degradation accumulated over centuries is unprecedented.

What the assessments ultimately convey is humility in the face of complexity. The recognition that systems built over generations can fail within seasons. That the margin between subsistence and catastrophe is narrower than comfortable assumption allows. That the future is not an extrapolation of the past but a terrain of radical uncertainty.

The granaries speak in whispers now. The satellite imagery reveals parched fields. The fertilizer plants operate below capacity. The grain traders price in scarcity. The analysts draft their assessments. The populations at risk continue their daily struggle for calories, unaware that their fate has been modeled, projected, and largely determined by forces they did not create and cannot control.