A prominent House conservative is calling for a major shift in foreign policy that would end U.S. aid to Ukraine until America’s southern border is secure.
“No more money to secure Ukraine’s border until we secure our own,” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, said in a keynote speech at the Indiana Republican Party’s recent 2023 State Dinner, prompting a standing ovation.
In an apparently unprecedented move, Indiana GOP Chairman Kyle Hupfer announced at the party’s Aug. 10 dinner that Banks is the presumptive nominee for U.S. Senate.
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal, Banks elaborated on why he framed border security as more important to address than additional support toward arming Ukraine in its war with Russia.
“The crisis at the border is the number one issue that every group of Republicans who I speak to across the state of Indiana asks about,” Banks said. “Hoosier voters want to know that they’re electing leaders to Congress who are more focused on solving our problems.”
Banks said he believes this is one of the reasons his candidacy for Senate resonates so strongly with Republicans in Indiana and across the United States.
“With me, they know they’re going to get someone who’s focused on solving our own open-border fentanyl epidemic that’s killing a record number of Hoosiers—and is the leading cause of death [in Indiana],” he told The Daily Signal.
The state GOP officially asked the Republican National Committee to support Banks financially in the open Senate primary to replace incumbent Republican Mike Braun, who is running for Indiana governor.
Banks has no major GOP primary opponents, although Eric Benson, John Rust, and Anthony Tibby are also declared candidates. On the Democratic side, Senate candidates in Indiana so far include little-known hopefuls Marc Carmichael, Valerie Lyn McCray, Keith Potts, Marshall Travis, and Aleem Young.
Banks said that placing America’s southern border before Ukraine isn’t just about the dire crisis of illegal immigration, but providing accountability for spending taxpayer dollars.
“At the moment, there is no inspector general” to oversee U.S. aid to Ukraine, the Indiana Republican said.
”There’s no accountability for the flow of money sent to Ukraine,” he said. “With the current administration asking for another supplemental spending bill, we’re talking about well over $100 billion spent on what’s going on in Ukraine.”
Banks voted against a $1.7 trillion spending package in December that included a $40 billion supplemental aid package for Ukraine.
Many Americans have soured on the billions of dollars in financial aid and equipment going to the Ukraine-Russia war. According to a recent CNN poll, a majority of Americans no longer support the massive financial aid packages that have become common in Congress.
GOP leadership in the Senate has remained stalwart in promising aid to Ukraine “for a good deal longer.” But Banks said he thinks Republican voters aren’t going to put up with it for much longer and will “demand” better Senate leadership to solve the border crisis.
“Either you’re more focused on what’s going on over there, or you’re more focused on what’s going on at home,” he said. “As [voters] watch our country crumble from within, they’re demanding leaders at all levels that focus on that instead of focusing on what’s going on in Ukraine or around the world.”
Banks said he doesn’t think that only Republicans are increasingly fed up with a lack of attention to domestic issues.
“I think voters at large, not just Republican voters but all voters, are recognizing that America is weaker than it’s ever been in our lifetime,” he told The Daily Signal.
What’s the solution? Banks said it’s an inward focus on “solving the energy crisis, solving the border crisis, solving the onset of the drug crisis, solving the economic issues that we have here at home,” and turning Congress’ attention toward threats posed by China.
Banks made it clear that putting America’s needs first “is an important test for Republicans.”
“We have to be on the side of America first—in restoring and rebuilding America—[and] then we can be the leaders around the globe that America has traditionally been,” he said. “America can’t lead abroad when we’re so weak at home, and Reagan understood that. Trump understood that. There are too many Republicans today who don’t understand that.”
Rebutting a common argument that to not give Ukraine a blank check is to support Russia, Banks pointed out that he favored “lethal aid to Ukraine” when Donald Trump was president and accountability measures were in place. And, he noted, he has been sanctioned by Russia.
“I’ve been sanctioned by them for my ‘tough on Russia’ record,” Banks said. “I stood with President Trump when he reversed the weak policies of the Obama administration to give lethal aid to Ukraine instead of Obama’s only sending humanitarian aid in blankets.”
The call to put Americans first might be Republicans’ most effective campaign strategy, Banks said.
“It’s clear if we keep our focus on putting their interests first, then the Republican Party is going to have a bigger election in 2024 than I think what most people are predicting today,” he said.
Ken McIntyre contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.
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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.