The Iran War Could Collapse the United States in the Next Six Months

47,900,000 Americans went hungry last year. The USDA counts a household as food insecure when its members cannot reliably access enough food to eat. In 7.2 million of those households, someone skipped a full meal or went an entire day without eating because there was no money. 14 million of them were children.

On February 28th, the United States and Israel bombed Iran.

Within 48 hours, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a 21-mile-wide channel between Iran and Oman through which 20 percent of the world’s oil travels every single day.¹ A third of the world’s fertilizer travels through that same strait.² And it needed to arrive this month. The planting window does not wait so timely delivery is unwaveringly critical within the planting window.

Here is what nitrogen does to a corn plant. Applied at the right moment in the growing cycle, it drives the plant to produce grain. Cut the application in half and you do not get half a crop. The corn plant runs out of nitrogen mid-growth and stops producing. Farmers across the Northern Hemisphere are making their nitrogen purchases right now, ahead of spring planting. The ships carrying that nitrogen are anchored on the wrong side of a closed strait, or rerouting around the southern tip of Africa, adding weeks to delivery schedules and close to a million dollars in additional fuel costs per voyage.³

Urea, the most widely traded nitrogen fertilizer, cost $475 per metric ton at the Port of New Orleans the week before the war started. It cost $683 the following week.⁴ That is a 44 percent price increase in seven days. The American Farm Bureau, which does not typically use alarm language, called it a “double whammy” and warned that if farmers cannot get fertilizer in time, we will see reductions in planted acreage and lower yields across the country.⁵

There is no strategic reserve for fertilizer. The United States maintains a Strategic Petroleum Reserve for oil. There is no equivalent for nitrogen.⁶ When the supply runs short, farmers absorb the price, reduce their application, or switch crops. The harvest pays for it in the fall.

In 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted grain exports from one of the world’s largest wheat-producing regions. That disruption, which hit grain rather than the inputs that grow grain, produced 13.5 percent grocery inflation at its peak in the United States.⁷ Bread up 13 percent. Dairy up 12 percent. Meat up 10 percent. MST Marquee’s head of energy research has called the current disruption three times more severe than the 1973 Arab oil embargo.⁸ The 1973 embargo removed 5 percent of global oil supply. This one removes 20 percent by closing the Strait entirely, and it does so while simultaneously severing the fertilizer supply for the spring planting season, during the deepest cuts to American food assistance in the program’s history.⁹

Simon Johnson, MIT economist and 2024 Nobel laureate, put it plainly: “There is no excess capacity anywhere in the world that can fill that gap.”¹⁰ Maurice Obstfeld, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, said the effects will be most devastating in low-income countries where agricultural productivity is already challenged, and that adding this cost component produces “the prospect of significant food shortages.”¹¹

Obstfeld was talking about the world. He could have been talking about the U.S.

We don’t actually know how many Americans are food insecure right now. The USDA published its annual food security report every year for three decades. In September 2025, the administration cancelled it.¹² The last official number, 47.9 million, describes conditions in 2024. That was before new SNAP work requirements began removing people from the program. Before the deepest cuts to food assistance in the program’s history cleared Congress. Before the first bomb fell.

Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability ran its own survey in November 2025. It found food insecurity at 16 percent of the population, roughly 54 million people.¹³ That is the number we are working from. And 2.4 million of the people currently receiving SNAP benefits are projected to lose them entirely in 2026.¹⁴

When food prices go up, food insecurity goes up in a predictable ratio. The Food and Agriculture Organization has documented that a 10 percent increase in food prices produces a 3.5 percentage point rise in food insecurity.¹⁵ In the United Kingdom between 2022 and 2023, grocery inflation reached 19 percent. In one year, 2.5 million more people became food insecure and food bank parcel distribution rose 37 percent.¹⁶ In the United States in 2008, grocery inflation of 6.6 percent pushed 4.1 million more Americans into food insecurity, and SNAP enrollment climbed 57 percent, from 25.7 million to 40.3 million people.¹⁷

We are looking at grocery inflation of at least 20 percent. We are starting from a baseline of 54 million people who already cannot reliably eat. And we are cutting the safety net rather than expanding it. The cross-national evidence puts the number of food-insecure Americans, under those conditions, between 75 and 90 million.

The standard research finding on food shocks and political stability holds that high-income countries don’t destabilize over food prices. The International Monetary Fund found no significant effects on democratic institutions in wealthy nations when food prices spiked.¹⁸ That finding has been cited as reassurance. It shouldn’t be. It described a pattern of government behavior, not a geographical fact.

In 2011, food prices spiked across North Africa and the Middle East. Morocco and Syria both felt it. Morocco’s government responded immediately with constitutional reforms, expanded subsidies, and direct cash transfers to families who could not absorb the price increases. The country stabilized.¹⁹ Syria’s government did not respond. What followed was a civil war that killed half a million people and displaced half the country’s population. The food shock was the same. The difference was what the government did next.

A review of 60 peer-reviewed studies found that food price shocks produce political instability when they land on top of economic desperation, pre-existing grievances, and eroding institutional trust.²⁰ A single standard deviation increase in domestic food prices raises the odds of civil unrest by 75 percent. The IMF’s reassuring finding assumed a country with the capacity and the will to catch people when they fell. We entered this moment with debt exceeding GDP, inflation already above the Federal Reserve’s target, a housing crisis, and a government actively removing people from food assistance. The research assumed room to absorb. We spent that room.

Congress passed the deepest cuts to SNAP in the program’s history. The administration cancelled the only federal report that would have measured the damage. An administration official called concern about food insecurity fear-mongering.²¹ Then, on February 28th, the bombs fell. The grocery prices have not moved yet.

This is what the country looked like the day before they did.

771,480 people slept on the street or in a shelter on a single night in January 2024. That is the highest number ever recorded. 150,000 of them were children.²²

There are 7.1 million fewer affordable rental homes in this country than there are people who need them. Nearly two thirds of working-age renters cannot pay for food and healthcare after they pay rent.²³

9.3 million Americans worked more than one job in November 2025, the highest number in 25 years. Half of them have college degrees.²⁴

One in three Americans skipped or delayed medical care in the past year because they could not afford it. 20 million people carry medical debt right now.²⁵

American households owe $18.8 trillion. More than half of credit cardholders are carrying a balance to cover groceries and utilities, not vacations.²⁶

8 percent of the workforce is underemployed. That means millions of people who want full-time work and cannot find it, or who are working jobs that do not come close to paying what they need.²⁷

Federal employment is down 330,000 jobs since October 2024. Those are the people whose job it was to run the programs that hold all of the above together.²⁸

Every single one of those numbers gets worse when grocery bills go up 15 percent. The family that was barely making rent stops making rent. The person carrying medical debt on a credit card to buy groceries now has less credit and higher prices. The underemployed worker who needed full-time work faces a labor market contracting under inflationary pressure. The crises don’t sit beside each other. They feed each other, all at once, with the same shock driving all of them simultaneously.

Four days before the bombs fell, a new 10 percent tariff on most imports from all countries took effect. Steel and aluminum already carried tariffs of up to 50 percent. Chinese goods carried tariffs ranging from 7.5 to 100 percent depending on the product.²⁹

We started with 47.9 million people who could not reliably eat. That was before the tariffs. Before the SNAP cuts. Before the strait closed and the ships stopped moving and the farmers started changing their planting decisions in real time.

We are eleven days in. The planting window is barely open. The ships are still anchored. Six months of this, maybe less, and we are looking at the total collapse of the United States.

Here is a metaphor to help illustrate the situation.

The ship had holes in it. They fired the maintenance crew. The lifeboats were then lit on fire. And then they drove into an iceberg. At full throttle.

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References

¹ U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2025). World oil transit chokepoints. U.S. Department of Energy. https://www.eia.gov/international/content/analysis/special_topics/World_Oil_Transit_Chokepoints/wotc.pdf

² United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. (2026, March). Strait of Hormuz disruptions: Implications for global trade and development. UNCTAD. https://unctad.org/publication/strait-hormuz-disruptions-implications-global-trade-and-development

³ Geskey, C., quoted in: Burnson, P. (2026, March 10). How Strait of Hormuz closure can become tipping point for global economy. Supply Chain Management Review.

⁴ Pelli, T., quoted in: Burnson, P. (2026, March 10). How Strait of Hormuz closure can become tipping point for global economy. Supply Chain Management Review; Vlachopoulos, C., quoted in: Strait of Hormuz shutdown chokes global oil and fertilizer supplies. (2026, March 11). Agri-Pulse.

⁵ American Farm Bureau Federation. (2026, March). Statement on fertilizer market disruption following Strait of Hormuz closure. AFBF.

⁶ U.S. Department of Energy. (2025). Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response. https://www.energy.gov/ceser/strategic-petroleum-reserve

⁷ Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023). Consumer Price Index for food at home: 2022 annual summary. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2023/consumer-prices-up-9-9-percent-for-food-at-home-in-2022.htm

⁸ Stein, S. (2026, March). MST Marquee energy analysis: Current disruption three times severity of 1973 embargo. MST Marquee.

⁹ Congressional Budget Office. (2025). Estimated budgetary effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. CBO.

¹⁰ Johnson, S. (2026, March). Interview on Strait of Hormuz economic effects. MIT Sloan School of Management media.

¹¹ Obstfeld, M. (2026, March). Statement on food shortage prospects. Peterson Institute for International Economics.

¹² Dewey, C. (2025, September). USDA cancels annual food security report. Washington Post.

¹³ Purdue University Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability. (2025, November). Consumer food insights report: Wave 35. Purdue University. https://agri.purdue.edu/cfda/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Wave35-CFI-Report-Final.pdf

¹⁴ Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (2025). SNAP cuts in the reconciliation bill: 2.4 million people projected to lose benefits. CBPP. https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snap-cuts-reconciliation-bill

¹⁵ Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2011). The state of food insecurity in the world: How does international price volatility affect domestic economies and food security? FAO. https://www.fao.org/3/i2330e/i2330e.pdf

¹⁶ Office for National Statistics. (2023). Food prices and food security in the UK: 2022 to 2023. ONS; Trussell Trust. (2023). End of year stats. https://www.trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/latest-stats/end-year-stats/

¹⁷ Coleman-Jensen, A., Nord, M., Andrews, M., & Carlson, S. (2009). Household food security in the United States in 2008 (Economic Research Report No. ERR-83). U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45379/err83.pdf

¹⁸ Arezki, R., & Brückner, M. (2011). Food prices and political instability (IMF Working Paper WP/11/62). International Monetary Fund. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2011/wp1162.pdf

¹⁹ Coutinho, I. (2019). Food insecurity and political instability: A comparative analysis of the Arab Spring cases of Egypt, Syria, and Morocco. [Peer-reviewed academic publication — confirm journal and volume before publication.]

²⁰ World Food Program USA. (2022). Dangerously hungry: The link between food insecurity and conflict. WFP USA; Hendrix, C. S. (2015). Global food prices, regime type, and urban unrest in the developing world. Journal of Peace Research, 52(2), 143–157. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343314561599

²¹ [Administration official statement on fear-mongering — confirm specific name, date, and outlet before publication.]

²² U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. (2024). The 2024 annual homeless assessment report (AHAR) to Congress: Part 1 — point-in-time estimates of homelessness. HUD. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-AHAR-Part-1.pdf

²³ National Low Income Housing Coalition. (2025). The gap: A shortage of affordable homes. NLIHC. https://nlihc.org/gap

²⁴ Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, November). Multiple jobholders summary. U.S. Department of Labor; Richter, F. (2025, December). 9.3 million Americans work multiple jobs — a 25-year high. Statista.

²⁵ KFF. (2023). The burden of medical debt in the United States. Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/the-burden-of-medical-debt-in-the-united-states/

²⁶ Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (2026, January). Household debt and credit report: Q4 2025. Center for Microeconomic Data. https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc

²⁷ Economic Policy Institute. (2026). Underemployment in the United States. EPI; Muttitt, P. (2026, February 11). Struggling to get by: Behind the US underemployment crisis. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/2/11/struggling-to-get-by-behind-the-us-underemployment-crisis

²⁸ Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026, March). The employment situation — February 2026. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

²⁹ WilmerHale. (2026, February 20). Supreme Court holds IEEPA tariffs unlawful: President Trump terminates and partially replaces all IEEPA tariffs. WilmerHale; U.S. Trade Representative. (2026, February). Ambassador Greer issues statement on Supreme Court IEEPA decision. USTR. https://ustr.gov/about/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2026/february/ambassador-greer-issues-statement-supreme-court-ieepa-decision