International War Report

Today, I am launching the International War Report and the Energy Food Financial Crisis Report, which I will publish daily on X and probably once every two weeks on Substack, or perhaps more frequently, as these issues increasingly affect our everyday lives.

For 18 years, I have been publishing my cold climate reports, and for 23 years I have been publishing about the dangers of vaccines, which, of course, got me banned from Google and YouTube. No regrets there. The most important work I am doing these days is on my book, Carbon Dioxide Medicine: Critical Care to AntiAging. I intend to take on the world of medicine with one of the best and most ignored medicines we have for health and proper medical treatment.

Introduction To My Two New Reports

This is a war unlike any other war because the principal battlefield is increasingly the very infrastructure of modern civilization. The attacks are not confined to soldiers, cities, and military installations; they are reaching into the systems that keep billions of people alive and economies functioning—oil fields and refineries, tankers and shipping lanes, pipelines and power grids, ports and railways, communications networks, fertilizer supplies, farms, currencies, credit, and global supply chains.

The foundations themselves are under attack. Energy feeds agriculture, agriculture feeds humanity, transportation connects both, and finance keeps the entire machine moving. Damage one and the shock travels through the others. Damage several simultaneously and war becomes something much larger than a contest between armies: it becomes an assault on the operating system of industrial civilization. That is what makes the present conflict so different and so dangerous. The battlefield is no longer somewhere else. Through energy prices, food availability, inflation, interest rates, debt, and disrupted trade, the battlefield increasingly reaches into every country, every business, and eventually every household on Earth.

This is where the wars begin affecting almost everyone. The decisive development has been the impairment of Hormuz. Oil above $100 is not merely a financial-market event. Tankers are being attacked, freight and insurance costs have surged, Persian Gulf exports have fallen sharply, and Middle Eastern production remains heavily disrupted. Reuters reports Brent at around $101.61, with analysts increasingly treating the conflict as prolonged rather than temporary.

Diesel matters even more than crude for everyday civilization because diesel moves trucks, tractors, harvesters, ships and heavy machinery. Recent Middle East disruption has already pushed diesel prices dramatically higher. Energy therefore flows directly into transportation, manufacturing, refrigeration, fertilizer production and eventually supermarket prices.

Food is now beginning to show the damage.

This is perhaps the most important part of the report. The FAO Food Price Index rose 1.9% in August alone to 133.3, with every major food category rising. Cereals increased 2.2%, reaching their highest level since May 2024. Food prices are now 2.5% higher than a year ago.

FAO says a combination of Middle East disruption, Black Sea logistics problems, and adverse weather is already driving the increase. That matters because this is precisely the combination we have been watching develop: war disrupts supply chains while weather simultaneously reduces the system’s ability to compensate.

The deeper problem is fertilizer. FAO warned back in May that disruption around Hormuz was creating fertilizer scarcity that would affect future harvests and food supplies into 2027. Fertilizer shortages do not immediately appear as empty supermarket shelves. They first appear as higher farmer input costs, reduced application, poorer yields and planting decisions—and only months later as lower food availability.

That delayed effect is why I remain more concerned about 2027 than today’s grocery prices.

At present, global grain supplies are not collapsing. FAO still describes aggregate cereal production as historically high. That is an important cushion. But the cushion is being attacked simultaneously by fertilizer costs, diesel prices, Black Sea logistics, weather risk, and Middle Eastern shipping disruption.

So we are not yet at global famine. We are at the stage where the machinery that produces affordable food is becoming progressively more expensive and fragile.

Then comes the financial system

This is where the energy shock becomes much larger.

Normally, a major war produces fear, investors buy government bonds, and interest rates fall. This time, oil inflation is partially reversing that mechanism.

The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield has been pushing toward 5%, around its highest levels in roughly three years, while financial markets increasingly contemplate another Federal Reserve rate increase rather than the cuts that many expected earlier.

Europe is experiencing the same pressure. Markets are pricing an almost certain ECB increase to 2.5%, largely because the energy shock has renewed inflation concerns.

Japan is also moving toward tighter policy, with the yen strengthening as markets anticipate another BOJ increase.

That gives us the central economic chain:

War → disrupted energy → expensive oil and diesel → expensive fertilizer and transportation → higher food prices → inflation → higher interest rates → higher government, corporate and household borrowing costs.

And then it feeds back upon itself.

Countries with enormous debts must refinance them at higher rates. Companies face higher financing expenses. Farmers pay more for credit as well as fuel and fertilizer. Mortgages become more expensive. Governments have less money available for social spending because debt service consumes more of their budgets.

This is why I think the phrase Energy, Food & Financial Crisis describes the situation better than simply “oil crisis.”

Energy is hitting agriculture.

Agriculture is hitting food prices.

Energy and food are hitting inflation.

Inflation is hitting interest rates.

Interest rates are hitting the world’s enormous debt structure.

And underneath it all sits an expanding network of wars attacking the physical systems modern civilization depends on.

Where we are today is not yet collapse. It is progressive loss of resilience. The safety margins—cheap energy, predictable shipping, inexpensive fertilizer, stable food prices and cheap credit—are being removed one after another. That is the trajectory I would watch most carefully into 2027.

International War Report — Where We Are Today

The clearest development of the past six months is that the world has moved from several separate wars toward a more interconnected system of confrontation. Ukraine remains locked in a grinding war with Russia, but the danger is no longer confined to the battlefield. Germany now formally attributes the attempted explosive-drone attack at Leipzig/Halle airport to Russian-directed actors, and Berlin has responded with sanctions and closures of Russian institutions. European officials increasingly describe Russian cyberattacks, sabotage and covert operations as a sustained hybrid war below NATO’s Article 5 threshold.

Inside Ukraine, the earlier tensions between the SBU, military intelligence and Zelensky’s leadership remain a standing vulnerability, but there has not yet been another major internal rupture. The more immediate military reality is that Ukraine is still seeking huge quantities of air-defense ammunition while Russia continues sustained missile and drone attacks. Ukraine, meanwhile, has expanded its own long-range drone attacks against Russian energy and military infrastructure. This is increasingly a war of infrastructure attrition, not simply territorial conquest.

The most dangerous front today is unquestionably Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. The United States and Iran have entered their largest direct attacks on commercial shipping since the war began. Iran says it attacked ten ships after U.S. forces destroyed five Iranian tankers; Iran also launched ballistic missiles toward a U.S.-used base in Jordan. At least one seafarer has been killed, other vessels have been damaged, and Washington has openly adopted a policy of destroying Iranian tankers in response to attempted attacks on U.S. warships.

Hormuz has therefore changed from a threatened chokepoint into an actively impaired chokepoint. Oil flows have fallen to roughly 2 million barrels a day during the latest escalation, versus as much as 8–9 million immediately before the renewed fighting. At the same time, the Strait ordinarily carries roughly one-fifth of globally traded oil and gas. Brent is now around $101–102 a barrel, roughly 30% higher than in early August.

The nuclear danger has also moved closer to the military conflict. President Trump today threatened further strikes if Iran expands activity around the fortified Pickaxe Mountain complex near Natanz. That means the nuclear issue and the shipping war are no longer independent crises. A miscalculation involving enrichment facilities could transform an already dangerous regional war into something considerably larger.

The essence of the war report is this: we are watching the boundary between conventional war, economic warfare, infrastructure warfare, and covert warfare disappear. Ukraine/Russia, NATO/Russia, and Iran/U.S. are different conflicts, but increasingly they are attacking the same foundations—energy, transportation, communications, shipping, and industrial capacity.