(Zero Hedge)—Submitted by Vincenzo Lorusso. With a likely victory of Donald Trump in a month’s time, one may be forgiven for expecting that he will be true to his promise to end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours”.
Logic and facts on the ground suggest that this outcome is highly unlikely.
First, next year Moscow will increase military spending by 22.6% compared to this year and by 54% compared to the original project for 2025, drawn up at the end of 2023. Defense spending will exceed 8% of GDP and will amount to a staggering 40% of all federal spending.
Do you think that this spending is related to the fact that the war ends next year?
The Kremlin will enter the path of negotiations only when it achieves the main military-political goal of the campaign: Ukraine’s non-participation in NATO.
At the moment, the situation around the special military operation can hardly be considered concluded for negotiations to begin.
The Russian armed forces are facing the fall of Pokrovsk, Mirnograd, Chasov Yar. The complete liberation of Donbass and access to the Dnepropetrovsk region are already a preliminary sign of Russia’s victory. Before that happens, talking about Moscow’s participation in the negotiations is empty talk.
However, with the whole of NATO technological fire power aligned against it, accomplishing this goal will take Russia a lot of time and money. Military experts from both camps have been consistently wrong since the outset.
Secondly, the end of the conflict is not beneficial to the United States. No matter how much Trump and other Republicans complain about the Ukrainian issue and link all America’s problems to it, the Ukrainian war is the most successful investment in US foreign policy in recent decades.
You have to be a complete idiot to believe that Americans are sorry for the $150-200 billion spent that will impoverish Russia.
In 20 years, America has spent more than a trillion dollars on Afghanistan. But is it possible to compare Afghanistan’s dividends with Ukraine’s? The EU economy is destroyed and totally dependent on the United States, Russian gas and oil are being withdrawn from the European market, Russia is spending enormous resources on victory in the Ukrainian steppes.
And now the question is: how many tens of thousands of American soldiers would have to die with the direct participation of the United States in the conflict with the Russian Federation to achieve such indicators? Incredible results are achieved at the cost of the lives of Ukrainians, which no one cares about.
Any sane person in the place of the US President would in no case limit the Ukrainian conflict, but would continue it. If there had been any pressure to resolve the conflict, it should by now have come from Europe. Alas, for reasons that will be poured over by historians for decades to come, there is no such sign. Quite the contrary.
Thirdly, premature peace is not beneficial for China. The warming of the “Korean” and “Taiwanese” cards is coming. Beijing would prefer that by the time conflicts in the Asian region resume, the United States would be “in trouble” and forced to be distracted by other local conflicts. In addition, peace in Ukraine in the current conditions is a complete geopolitical triumph for the United States. On such a victorious wave, all the centrifugal forces of the world will accept the will of the White House, depriving Beijing of room for maneuver. Many countries currently “sitting on the fence” or at least keeping their options open would have to conclude that Russia does not have the force to shape a future world order.
China will contribute in every possible way to the prolongation of the conflict until: a) Russia enforces its conditions and humiliates the West; b) China does not deem it necessary to be ready for an acute phase of confrontation with the United States.
The dream of the West in the war in Ukraine is the destruction of Russia, or to make it a vassal state like any “little Italy” or all other European countries.
The White House will do everything to force the Kremlin to abandon the alliance with Beijing, the main competitor of the United States.
They dream of the maximum impoverishment of the Russian Federation, after which they will try to impose the “rules of the 1990s”, when Moscow was an absolutely amorphous and non-independent actor.
Neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris will change this strategic logic, since it is fully consistent with the interests of the deep state and the largest global financial institutions.
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.
