(International Man)—Did you know the US Army missed its recent recruiting goal by 25% or 60,000 new soldiers? It’s the worst recruiting crisis for the Pentagon since the end of the draft in 1973.
Even families with military backgrounds, typically the source of most recruits, are becoming less inclined to endorse military life. Polls have shown an overly politicized military leadership and woke training programs and policies as the main reason for the steep drop.
For instance, critical race theory has embedded itself in the US military. This includes spreading racial narratives that erode unit cohesion, classes on anti-racism, training against so-called radicalization, barring white service members from specific diversity training sessions, and the deliberate silencing of opposing viewpoints, among other policies.
West Point has introduced a minor in “Diversity and Inclusion,” while the Naval Academy provides courses that focus on themes related to “critical race theory” and “intersectionality.” The US Air Force has even held recurring drag shows.
As part of this year’s “Pride” celebration, the Department of Defense trumpeted the story of a transgender soldier on social media.
These are just a tiny—but illustrative—set of examples of how the US military has embraced woke values.
It should be no surprise that fewer people want to participate in this Neo-Marxist nonsense while potentially taking orders from a man pretending to be a woman, subjecting themselves to the latest vaccine mandate, all while possibly dying, losing a limb, or getting PTSD from foreign wars that have nothing to do with where they come from.
Along the same lines, the US military is making a concerted effort to reduce its reliance on hydrocarbons not because it improves its capabilities but for political reasons—to appease the climate hysterics. However, so-called green alternatives—like electric vehicles and batteries—are not really green. They require rare strategic metals that are dirty to mine.
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It also increases the US military’s dependency on China because Beijing dominates the production of the components that go into so-called green technologies. They’re also more expensive and less reliable than hydrocarbons as a power source.
In short, by embracing green and woke policies, the US military is in a self-inflicted steep decline. It’s an internal cultural rot that shows no sign of reversing as it hollows out what was once a formidable fighting force. At the same time, the US faces an increasingly capable, non-woke peer competitor on the rise—China. If current trends continue, China has an excellent chance of surpassing the US militarily, economically, scientifically, and in various other fields.
According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China has a “stunning lead” over the US in 37 out of 44 critical and emerging technologies, particularly in the defense, space, energy, and biotechnology sectors. China’s rise—and the potential displacement of the US as the preeminent global power—is arguably this century’s most important geopolitical story.
Lee Kuan Yew, the former leader of Singapore, once correctly said:
“The size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance.
It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”
This trend had already picked up incredible momentum even before the US military embraced self-destructive policies. Those misguided policies have accelerated the trend by allowing China to narrow the gap faster than most expected. The situation will soon reach a tipping point.
Thucydides Trap
Sooner rather than later, we will find out whether the US can live with being #2… or, if not, what Washington will do about it. According to Harvard professor Graham Allison, there’s a 75% chance the US and China will go to war.
Allison bases his view on a dynamic called Thucydides Trap, which refers to the idea that when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, the result is often war.
It’s named after the Athenian historian Thucydides, who observed this dynamic in Ancient Greece. Today, it’s playing out between China and the US. Allison studied 16 cases of Thucydides Trap throughout history. The result was war in 12 of them—or 75% of the time.
Military conflict between the US and China is not inevitable. But if history is any guide, there’s an excellent chance it could happen soon.
Further, it’s becoming less likely every day that the US would prevail in such a conflict. That is pressuring Washington to act sooner rather than later.
A full-blown economic war is even more likely. I think it’s a virtual certainty, and we are probably already in the early stages of one right now.
To sum it all up, the US and China are battling over who will be the world’s most dominant power. It’s the ultimate geopolitical competition and a megatrend with enormous investment implications.
As tensions between the US and China continue to rise, I expect Washington and Beijing to focus on securing critical commodities and ensuring access to stable supplies. I think we can bet on the geopolitical competition between the US and China causing increased demand and unstable supplies.
That’s why obtaining exposure to strategic commodities could be a winning move as the US-China rivalry heats up.
Here’s the bottom line…
Unfortunately, most people have no idea what really happens when the two biggest world powers collide, let alone how to prepare… The coming crisis will be much worse, much longer, and very different than what we’ve seen since World War II. Countless millions throughout history were wiped out financially—or worse—as big powers collided.
Don’t be one of them.
That’s precisely why I just released an urgent new report with all the details, including what you must do to prepare. It’s called The Most Dangerous Economic Crisis in 100 Years… the Top 3 Strategies You Need Right Now. Click here to download the PDF now.
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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.