It’s easy to forget that ten years ago, candidate Donald Trump was the only national politician who took China’s growing geopolitical power seriously. He talked about China so frequently and pronounced those two syllables so deliberately — Chi-na — that comedians and voters alike enjoyed doing imitations of the MAGA-man taking America’s geopolitical adversary to task.
On the stump, Trump called both Republicans and Democrats “stupid” for how they had permitted the Chinese Communist Party to devour American assets. He would list beautiful American buildings and historic American real estate that the Chinese had acquired since President Bill Clinton and both parties in Congress decided to ignore China’s past bad behavior (including the ’89 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square) and welcome it into the world’s premier economic clubs.
He pointed to two decades of multinational trade “deals” that had resulted in the closures of industrial and manufacturing plants across the United States, as once-American companies shifted operations to China and took advantage of the communists’ disregard for workers’ safety or subsistence wages. He argued that China’s currency manipulation, organized theft of American trade secrets, and sidestepping of environmental and human rights treaties ensured that American wealth flowed in one direction: directly into the pockets of the CCP.
Trump couldn’t believe that American politicians could be so reckless, or worse, consciously willing to sabotage American economic interests for a traitor’s paycheck from Chinese-run lobbyists. He excoriated national companies for betraying Americans while profiting from slave labor on the other side of the world. His campaign for president was simultaneously a campaign against this percolating notion in the West that the twenty-first century belonged to China.
Remember how common it was a decade ago to hear pundits proclaim with certainty that this was “China’s century”? The Brits had handed Hong Kong to China’s communists in ’97 (with false assurances from the CCP that the former British colony’s democratic traditions would be respected for at least fifty years). President Clinton successfully maneuvered China into the World Trade Organization on his way out of office. As the new millennium began, businesses in the United States shifted manufacturing operations to China, and it seemed as if everything being sold in America now had a “made in China” label.
The managers of Wall Street’s big firms and the presidents of London’s big banks all opened fortune cookies promising big fortunes in China. European globalists such as the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab found the CCP’s totalitarian surveillance state an ideal model for the rest of the world to emulate. China’s billion-plus population and abundant supplies of critical natural resources led Western think tanks to conclude that there was no stopping China’s future global domination. As Hollywood partnered up with China’s communists to produce blockbuster movies, a message consistently made its way to the screen: China would soon lead the world and dominate the future.
Have you noticed that sometime between Donald Trump’s famous trip down Trump Tower’s golden escalator in 2015 to announce his presidential ambitions and his return to office last year (after surviving Deep State sabotage, lawfare, and assassination attempts) most of the “really smart” pundits have stopped talking about this being “China’s century” with so much certainty?
The shift in “punditry” didn’t happen overnight. During President Trump’s first term, if you recall, all the “smartest foreign policy people” told television viewers that Chinese President Xi Jinping would use “flattery” and “pragmatic fawning” to appeal to Trump’s “narcissism” while outsmarting him every step of the way with regard to crucial trade imbalances between the two countries. Xi invited Trump to China’s Forbidden City in 2017, a rare honor for a foreign guest. The no-longer-relevant scribblers at Time covered the historic event with this headline: “President Trump Meets the World’s Most Powerful Man in Beijing.”
Entirely dismissive of President Trump’s negotiating skills during his first term in office, Time’s editors advised the billionaire businessman to arrive with hat in hand and “ask nicely.” Time further declared, “China’s ascendancy is stark and only set to grow.” Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative “will boost Beijing’s influence beyond its borders just as Trump’s questioning of bedrock principles such as free trade, and toadying to authoritarian regimes, is diminishing Washington’s.” Here’s Time’s final kicker (which I love): “Trump might talk tough, but don’t expect Xi to tremble.”
Boy those geniuses at Time sure framed the Trump-Xi dynamic accurately, didn’t they? Fast-forward to today, and everywhere you look, two things seem crystal clear: Trump is on the attack, and China is backpedaling. Do leftwing “journalists” still believe President Trump is all bark, no bite?
Sundance over at The Last Refuge put together a succinct list of Trump’s MAGA kung fu: “First blow: the Trump tariffs hit Beijing hardest. Second blow: the Beijing tentacle on the Panama Canal is severed. Third blow: global tariff threats changed the risk dynamic for southeast Asia countries who acted as transnational shippers for China. Fourth blow: cheap sanctioned oil from Venezuela was cut-off. Now, the fifth blow: cheap, sanctioned Iranian oil is disrupted.” Nearly 20% of Beijing’s oil came from Iran and Venezuela, and both countries had given Xi a premium discount in exchange for promises of Chinese technology and security. China was purchasing more than 80% of Iran’s shipped oil.
What happens when oil stops flowing to China? Alarm bells go off. China has immediately halted domestic refiners from exporting diesel and gasoline. First Trump takes China’s supply of oil coming from Venezuela. Then Trump takes China’s supply of oil coming from Iran.
At the same time, Trump reasserts the supremacy of the petrodollar on world oil markets, just as China was successfully negotiating purchases in yuan. While taking out narco-terrorist dictator Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Islamic terrorist dictator Ali Khamenei in Iran, Trump simultaneously defends the dollar from Chinese attack.
Newsmax host Carl Higbie did an excellent job the other night explaining in nine short minutes all the different ways President Trump is making America’s position stronger and China’s position weaker in the world. While China funds domestic protests inside the United States to frustrate Trump’s policy initiatives, the president pursues rare earth elements in Greenland (to end any long-term dependency on China), severs Chinese influence in South and Central America, and re-establishes American dominance over oil supplies in the Middle East. Higbie takes a hard look at members of Congress, Western allies, and even NATO and concludes that President Trump is singlehandedly “containing” China while everyone else is “asleep at the wheel.”
President Trump refuses to give communist China control over the world’s future. In speech after speech, he tells listeners that both the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries will be “American centuries.” Every economic and foreign policy decision Trump makes considers that policy’s impact on the war already being waged between China and the United States for global supremacy.
There’s a well-known but apocryphal Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” President Trump should send truckloads of fortune cookies to President Xi containing that wish. On the flip side where the lucky numbers usually go, he should print this in red: 45-47, MAGA, KAG.
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.