(Mises)—Most of our readers are too young to remember the Vietnam War of a half-century ago, but those of us holding draft cards classifying us as 1A have a more personal perspective. In 1971, when I received my low draft number, all I could think was that perhaps I, too, would have to participate in the horror that was combat in that wicked war.
The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973—signed a month after I took my military physical—ended direct US involvement, although the US government continued to aid the South Vietnamese until their government and armed forces completely collapsed in April 1975. Today, Vietnam and the US are at peace with each other, but even today, unexploded US bombs continue to blow up and kill innocent people.
Samuel Johnson wrote in 1758:
Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.
To put it another way, war breeds lies. Lies gave us Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now the Ukraine War. Like it has done with so many wars that have US involvement, the New York Times has first promoted the conflicts it later claims to abhor, and Ukraine is no exception. Popular columnist David French—who has never seen a US war he didn’t support—two years ago visited Ukraine and gushed about the “valor” he saw with the Ukraine people:
This is primarily a Ukrainian story, of course. We know from bitter experience that we can supply “allies” with billions of dollars of American weapons, only to watch them collapse in the face of a determined attack. But Ukrainian valor and resolve are breathtaking. Most Ukrainians I’ve talked to since arriving don’t say “after the war”; they say “after the victory.” But this is also an American story, and at the risk of sounding a bit corny, when I watched the air defenses we helped build intercept Russian hypersonic missiles above Kyiv, I felt proud to be an American.
With the Donald Trump administration now trying to broker a peace, French is not as “proud to be an American” as he was before January 20, and his rage-filled columns are aimed at either Trump or evangelical Christians that don’t share French’s political views. However, even French’s employer is now admitting that President Joe Biden and others in his administration were lying all along about the war, its progress, and the extent of US involvement:
But a New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood. At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.
One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, who always has said that US involvement was much deeper than Biden and his acolytes were claiming, writes:
The people who quarterbacked the NATO side of the Ukraine war are so pleased with themselves, they can’t keep from boasting about things that will make the average American want to pitchfork the lot of them. (Adam) Entous (of the NYT) describes a tale told “through a secret keyhole” that reveals how America was “woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” (Translation: it was hidden from us.) Sources not only make it clear that the public was lied to on a continuous basis from the outset of the conflict, they describe how we were lied to, apparently thinking the methods clever. Some are small semantic gambits the idiots wrongly believe exculpated their actions, but the main revelation involves one gigantic, inexcusable deception. From Joe Biden down, they all lied about the risk of World War III.
They risked our lives and our children’s lives, knowingly, repeatedly, and for the worst possible reason: politics. Afraid to admit a mistake, they planned individual excuses while letting bureaucratic inertia expand the conflict. Worse, as was guessed at on this site late last year, the Biden administration after last November’s election increased the risk of global conflict by “expanding the ops box to allow ATACMS and British Storm Shadow strikes into Russia,” in order to “shore up his Ukraine project.” If you check this “secret history” against contemporaneous statements of American and European leaders, you’ll find the scale of the lies beyond comprehension.
One only can conclude that the US had stepped well over the boundaries of what would be called “acts of war,” and only paying scant attention to the fact that Russia still has nuclear weapons aimed at US cities. According to the NYT:
The partnership operated in the shadow of deepest geopolitical fear — that Mr. Putin might see it as breaching a red line of military engagement and make good on his often-brandished nuclear threats.
Although the Biden administration claimed this was not a “proxy war,” it was the very definition of a proxy war, with Ukrainian political leaders wanting even more US involvement, making the American advisers a veritable “trip wire” if Russia attacked any Americans. Indeed, it was the major deception known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that brought American ground troops to Vietnam in the first place.
This whole point bears repeating: the Biden administration was willing to risk nuclear war with Russia to promote a war that never needed to be fought in the first place. By pushing NATO to Russia’s borders and using CIA, USAID, and agents from other agencies to destabilize regimes bordering on Russia, the US risked plunging an entire region into pointless warfare. Taibbi writes:
While the Times piece does little to clear up whose fault the military and diplomatic failure was (there were numerous passages of the “mistakes were made” variety), it’s clear we were lied to about everything. Zelensky and his set will no doubt tell their side now, and it’s possible Ukraine’s freelanced heightening of risk to Americans will come out seeming less treacherous. Either way, it’s clear the Biden administration should have cut the cord years ago, to prevent Americans from being dragged into World War by “partners” with every incentive to pull them in. Instead, the administration berated its critics as treasonous cowards who’d have let Hitler swim to London.
Given that most of the political players in this fiasco are out of power, new scrutiny will likely move to the Trump administration’s actions. Yet, while we have “dodged a bullet” (or, better put, “dodged a nuclear missile”), this affair is not over. More than a million people have died, much of Ukraine lies in ruins, and Trump has been unable to broker that elusive cease fire.
None of this had to happen. The Biden administration was full of Samantha Power and David French types that have anxiously awaited the US’s latest “war of liberation.” In the end, of course, there is no liberation, just the death, destroyed cities, and irresponsible international “experts” who already are in search of their next war—until someone stops them.
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.
