(Daily Signal)—Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, the German government announced that it is going to label or maybe relabel the Alternative für Deutschland—the Alternative for Germany—the conservative party that has an antithetical agenda both to the German government of both liberal and conservative factions, but also to the EU in general.
Anyway, it is announced that it will classify it as a dangerous far-right organization. And that will cement this aura that no government, under their parliamentary democracy system, will ask them to join to form a majority government. So, the process of ostracism and demonization of this party continues.
And what is the party advocating? The party is advocating an alternative for the way that Germany is going. And very briefly, we’ve talked about this, but if you look at what has become of Germany, it has had two years of essentially no growth or negative growth. Only recently, last year, did it finally, after 30 years, invest a measly 2% of its gross domestic product as it had promised in 2014. It had not met that goal. It just barely did it.
It’s had a systematic decommission of its nuclear power plants. And how anybody could rely on solar power in Germany—but yet the German government invested heavily in it. And the result is that German power, electricity—heating, cooling, and industrial use—is about four times what the average power cost is in the United States. And you can see what that’s gonna do to German investment.
They had been also sort of noncommittal about Chinese mercantilism. Because Germany—remember 10 years ago, eight years ago—started to get massive exportation to China for things like cars, especially electric vehicles, and solar panels and industrial equipment.
And they didn’t quite think that China was going to do to them what China had done to us a decade earlier. And that is invite in a country to supply them with quality goods and plants in China and be very profitable as the Chinese mastered that craft, mastered that industry, both this material side of production and the bureaucratic and corporate management.
And when China did that, they began to create German-like EVs, German-like solar panels at a much less cost and then started to export it and ruin much of Germany’s export market.
What am I getting at? Germany, in terms of power, in terms of a border that has been open, in terms of about 16% to 18% of the population that was not born in Germany and is not fully assimilated—these are refugees. Or I don’t think they’re refugees—they’re illegal immigrants from the volatile Middle East. Most of them are Muslim. Most of them do not have an intention of assimilating, intermarrying, and integrating fully in German society.
And you add all this up—and I’m not being critical. It’s very tragic because for years Germany was the powerhouse, the cohesive economic power that kept the EU together. And during the Cold War it fielded one of the best NATO armies, West Germany. Well over 400,000 troops. It’s almost literally disarmed. It cannot fulfill even its meager commitments to help Ukraine. And out of this tension, if it was a normal democratic society, you would have a variety of vocal opponents, proponents, give and take, yin and yang, and there would be a lively mix-up.
And they would come to a consensus that these were the masters of nuclear power. Twenty years ago, German physicists were the top in the world—nuclear physicists. They would start investing again in nuclear power. They would start up natural gas generation. Wind and solar would be integral, but a small part, because they would need reliable, cheap energy to compete on the world market. They would join the United States and look at China and say, “This is intolerable, this system of mercantilism.” They would close their borders. They would go to an assimilationist model and require immigrants that came legally to fully become Germans. They would do all of that.
But instead, when one party is advocating much of what I just talked about, they demonize it because it’s out of the norm. And the norm, unfortunately, in Germany today is national suicide.
Unfortunately, this is not going to end well for Germany. And it’s not gonna end well for us. We need a powerful, friendly Germany. And we wish it well. But the reaction to needed reform—economic, political, social, cultural, military, diplomatic—is not to essentially ban a political party’s freedom of expression. That shows weakness and fear rather than confidence in the future.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
Germany’s economic success is now labeled at “far right extremism”!!