The war in Ukraine has been raging for over five hundred days, with no end in sight. In the first year of the war, the U.S. Congress approved over $113 billion in aid for Ukraine.
To prepare for the “spring offensive,” President Joe Biden authorized another $675 million to help the Ukrainian military. After the military progress was halted by the Russians, Biden decided to send controversial cluster munitions to the Ukrainian military.
These munitions are banned by more than 100 nations because of the “large numbers of smaller bomblets that can kill indiscriminately over a wide area.” In many cases, the victims are innocent civilians.
This decision will inevitably lead to an escalation as Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed his country has a “stockpile of different kinds of cluster bombs.” He vowed, “if they are used against us, we reserve the right to take reciprocal action.”
As the war intensifies, there seems to be zero progress on the diplomatic front. However, we need to pursue peace talks immediately before a nuclear war starts.
President Donald Trump has been sounding the alarm about the irresponsible actions of the Biden administration in Ukraine. He posted on Truth Social, “Joe Biden should not be dragging us further toward World War III by sending cluster munitions to Ukraine—he should be trying to END the war and stop the horrific death and destruction being caused by an incompetent administration.”
Unfortunately, Biden is President, not Trump. The Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reaffirmed the Biden administration strategy in a meeting with reporters at the G20 Financial Ministers Summit in India. Yellen said that aid to Ukraine was “the single best thing we can do for the global economy.”
Is she right? Is the continuation of the war “the single best thing” for the “global economy.” Of course not, the world does not benefit from the continuation of a brutal war. What is needed is the start of peace negotiations. The United States could broker such talks, but the Biden administration is uninterested.
Instead, Biden just authorized the activation of 3,000 military reservists to support our operations in Europe. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden sent an additional 20,000 troops to Europe, bringing our total forces to over 100,000 on the continent.
These actions lead Central Intelligence Agency veteran Larry Johnson to conclude that “the United States is giving every indication that it is prepared to have a confrontation with Russia.” This strategy is extremely reckless considering that the Russians have the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and the Ukrainians are having a challenging time providing enough manpower for their military operations.
According to the Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet, “Many conscripted men are taken straight off the street by uniformed men….in Subcarpathia, a surveillance camera recorded the overreach of the authorities as a man trying to go to a store was kidnapped from his bicycle in broad daylight.” Many of these abductions have been recorded on video and posted on encrypted apps such as Telegram.
In response, some young men are refusing to leave their homes, hoping to avoid being sent to the front lines of the war. Others are avoiding forced conscription by bribing Ukrainian military recruitment officials. Many of these officials have become rich. In fact, one of them, Yevgeny Borisov, bought a luxury mansion on the Spanish coast and a chain of high-priced retail stores for his wife.
Sadly, corruption is rampant in Ukraine, which is why even supporters of our military assistance efforts, U.S. Senators John Kennedy (R-LA) and Krysten Sinema (I-AZ), wrote that “Americans lack a proper accounting of how our aid has worked thus far.” In their op-ed, the Senators also noted that “We’ve heard several unsettling reports of bad actors exploiting our generosity. Some of our costly weapons have ended up in black markets. And corrupt officials have tried to line their own pockets.”
Yes, the Senators are correct. Ukrainian officials such as Yevgeny Borisov and others have become wealthy from the war. Incredibly, weapons sent from Ukraine have been spotted in the hands of members of Mexican drug cartels.
This insane gravy train will continue until at least the end of the Biden administration. At a recent bilateral meeting in Lithuania, Biden boasted to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the United States had “given more than every other nation combined in terms of assistance and cost.”
Why has the United States been so generous with our taxpayer funds when many wealthy European nations have barely contributed to the Ukrainian war effort? Biden did not receive the approval of the American people to fund the Ukraine military and government. In addition, there has been no declaration of war by the United States Congress.
At the same time, horrible problems in our country have been ignored by many of the political leaders of both parties. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, wants an increase in military support to Ukraine.
Pence was recently scolded by Tucker Carlson at a presidential primary forum in Iowa. Carlson fumed, “You are distressed that the Ukrainians don’t have enough American tanks. Every city in the United States has become much worse over the past three years. Drive around. There is not one city that has gotten better in the United States, and it’s visible. Our economy has degraded, the suicide rate has jumped, public filth and disorder and crime have exponentially increased, and yet your concern is that the Ukrainians, a country most people can’t find on a map, who’ve received tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars, don’t have enough tanks.”
Rightfully Carlson asked him “where’s the concern for the United States?” Incredibly, Pence claimed it was “not my concern.”
The top “concern” for every presidential candidate should be the United States, not Ukraine. As President Trump noted, we must stop the “insanity” in Ukraine and “return to a focus on America’s vital interests.” Amen.
About the Author
Jeff Crouere is a native New Orleanian and his award-winning program, “Ringside Politics,” airs Saturdays from Noon until 1 p.m. CT nationally on Real America’s Voice TV Network & AmericasVoice.News and weekdays from 7-11 a.m. CT on WGSO 990-AM & Wgso.com. He is a political columnist, the author of America’s Last Chance and provides regular commentaries on the Jeff Crouere YouTube channel and on Crouere.net. For more information, email him at [email protected]
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.
Judas Pence is toast….it seems he’s more concerned about the Ukraine and that the issues ware facing in the USA are not his concern at all……..he also doesn’t presently have enough donors to be eligible to attend and of the primary debates…..
TRUMP-LAKE 2024 for THE WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!MAGA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FJB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now Trump says that he will send more weapons to Ukraine than anyone has sent to scare Putin if Trump is reelected. Our republic is done for.
Back in the days when journalism was actually a thing, some bright, aspiring young journalist would’ve started a “follow the money” series with all of these political hawks inside and outside the halls of government. The military industrial complex money talks and constituencies walk. Combine that with the corrupt laundromat that is Ukraine and you have the recipe for WWIII. Duck and cover.