The “world order” is certainly shifting, isn’t it?
Since Obama’s presidency, central banks have been reducing their holdings of U.S. dollars and increasing their gold reserves. This trend began when the Obama administration used the dollar’s status as the world reserve currency and U.S. leverage over international financial institutions (particularly the international payment system known as SWIFT) to punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea back in 2014. Later, the Biden administration and the European Commission used these same financial weapons — while imposing widespread economic sanctions and asset freezes — to punish Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. The message to the world was clear: The more that nation states depend upon U.S. dollars and Western-controlled financial institutions, the more vulnerable they are to economic coercion.
During this same period of time, U.S. national debt has continued to grow. That debt will soon reach forty trillion dollars, while annual interest payments are approaching one trillion dollars. When President George W. Bush was in office, there was a clamor among D.C.’s class of political and economic pundits about how the financial toll of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had pushed the national debt over six trillion dollars.
Some analysts argued that if the federal government did not immediately arrest its profligate spending, the global financial system would one day collapse. Those warnings fell on deaf ears. “Austerity” became a dirty word. Government spending in the U.S., Europe, and throughout most of the world has continued unabated. The stubborn arithmetic of the global debt bomb abides.
The economic system as we know it today is on wobbly footing. Some people have been predicting economic Armageddon for two decades or more. (Some have been predicting catastrophe since the Federal Reserve’s stealthy creation during Christmas of 1913, or at least since President Nixon decoupled the U.S. dollar from gold in mid-August of 1971.)
Others point to the ability of central bank magicians to somehow conjure novel financial instruments — sometimes not much more than money-printing duct tape hidden behind the complexity of an economic Rube Goldberg machine — and keep the global system humming, notwithstanding the increasingly loud rumblings and unnerving vibrations shaking the whole funny money contraption.
Regardless of one’s faith in the future of the U.S. dollar or the wisdom of allowing an elite cadre of central bankers to manage the not-so-free market according to the managerial class’s “best judgment,” one thing is clear: The powerful economic institutions that supposedly ensure the impartial operation of the “rules-based international order” are an essential part of the hybrid warfare being conducted on a global scale.
Along with information warfare (propaganda and censorship), industrial sabotage, the theft of trade secrets, artificially concocted “color revolutions,” foreign-funded “protest” movements, agricultural ruination, influence operations (blackmail), attacks on civil infrastructure, digital infiltration, covert assassinations, and traditional espionage, economic warfare is an indisputable part of the threat environment that defines the modern battlespace.
In this battlespace, the U.S. dollar continues to survive because it acts as an economic version of the Cold War’s “mutually assured destruction” paradigm used to constrain the nuclear actions of the Soviet Union and the United States. The threat of total nuclear war and mutual annihilation harnessed madness to counsel restraint. In the same way, America’s enemies, adversaries, and competitors — whose economies are inextricably linked to the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency — are painfully aware that should they exploit the vulnerabilities of the U.S.-controlled global financial system to weaken the United States, they will also be attacking the stability of their own systems.
In this Mexican standoff in which adversarial nation states struggle to gain an advantage without damaging their own interests, what do (hybrid-) warring nations do? They invest in hard commodities such as gold and oil. Those real, tangible commodities, in turn, provide nations with enduring sovereign wealth that can be used to prop up a future monetary system should the existing one collapse. Nations that are gobbling up gold and hydrocarbon energies these days are taking out insurance on an unstable future.
Should the dollar collapse in the future, the rest of the world’s fiat currencies will fall like dominos, too. If decentralized Bitcoin fails to supplant central bankers’ micromanaged funny monies, governments will institute government-controlled digital currencies of their own.
Although some U.S. lawmakers have been squawking about the need to prevent the emergence of central bank digital currencies — because their use empowers governments to monitor and control all economic transactions, as well as enabling governments to confiscate (tax) and redistribute (from “privileged” groups to “victim” classes) personal savings at will — the European Central Bank is moving ahead with plans to institute a digital euro.
The People’s Bank of China already issued a digital renminbi several years ago, making it easier than ever for the communist regime to spy on the digital currency’s users and adjust citizens’ “social credit scores” according to their “positive” or “negative” transaction histories. If (or when) the days of worthless paper currency come to an end (after more than a century of central bank money-printing abuse), digital currencies backed by hard assets will be the emergency off-ramp for nation states.
After a devastating financial collapse, real commodities become the backbone of any new system. A nation’s natural resources — including agricultural goods, minerals, metals, timber, coal, gas, and oil — become the stored value backing any kind of currency that a nation issues. Countries that are rich in hydrocarbon energies — such as the Russian Federation and the United States — have a distinct advantage over countries that import energy today.
Through this lens, consider how President Trump has positioned the United States relative to the rest of the world. In Trump’s first term, he unleashed a “Drill, baby, drill!” agenda that produced an American oil boom and transformed the U.S. into the world’s largest producer of natural gas.
While China, India, and Europe are all suffering economic hardship from the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the U.S. military’s ongoing pummeling of Iran’s Islamic-terrorist regime, Americans are in much better shape. Trump’s domestic energy policies succeeded in reducing American reliance on Middle Eastern energy exports. The U.S. imports less than 3% of its oil from the region and less than 1% of the supply that goes through the strait. By replacing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro with a leader more friendly to American interests, Trump has secured an additional source of hydrocarbon energies much closer to home.
In contrast, roughly 80% of Persian Gulf oil goes to China and other Asian markets. While the U.S. is completely self-sufficient when it comes to natural gas, Europe and Asia are heavily dependent on Middle Eastern supplies, including those from Qatar, which has been forced to shut down much of its natural gas operations.
China will find it much more expensive to manufacture goods when it is paying two or three times more for energy. Having already crippled its industrial sectors by foolishly chaining its economy to the unicorn dreams of wind and solar energies, Europe’s economic situation will become more dire. When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz spoke for all of Europe’s moronic leaders and insisted that European nations would refuse to protect oil shipments destined for European ports, he accelerated Europe’s economic suicide. It is difficult to prop up a digital euro when “green energy” buffoonery has separated the continent from its natural resources.
In the volatile years ahead, resource-rich nations will survive and lead. Resource-starved nations will crumble and beg. Meanwhile, American hydrocarbon producers are selling. It’s not the “new world order” that the greenie globalists want. But it is the one that’s coming.
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.
