In one of the little ironies of history, Edward Gibbons began publishing a six-volume writing project, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” in 1776, just as what would become the American Empire was being launched with a revolution against a powerful British Empire still in its ascendency. His final book in the series was published in 1788 as America was in the middle of its two-year transition from a confederacy to a constitutional republic. The British Empire peaked around 1914 and was surpassed by the United States as the world’s foremost superpower in World War II, becoming the sole superpower upon the success of the Anglo-American partnership in collapsing its chief rival, the Soviet Union, during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations.
Studying the history of geopolitical upheavals is fascinating, but living through one makes the topic personal and often painful. Today the world is in the midst of a new upheaval involving many of the ancient powers seeking a new global order, led by a coalition called BRICS, which is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. On Aug. 22-24, 2023, the BRICS coalition doubled in size, adding Iran, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia, effective Jan. 1, 2024.
The dominant powers of this group are primarily Russia and China, with Russia providing the executive and military leadership and China providing both the financial stability of an economic giant and the political leverage of holding most of deeply indebted America’s loans. But all 12 of these countries are developed nations with a common interest in ending Anglo-American hegemony – which largely translates into ending U.S./British control of global trade and banking, and defanging NATO as its global enforcer.
For decades, rival elites on both sides of this divide have been engaged in a global chess-match set mostly along the imaginary boundary line of Europe and Asia – because apparently most of them accept Mackinder’s maxim that whoever controls Eurasia controls the world. But adding to the complexity of this equation, and bringing in other regions, especially the Middle East, is the importance of trade routes, including oil pipelines.
If you start with this premise and look back over geopolitics since WWII, all the subsequent lesser wars and “police actions” initiated mostly by the U.S. fit easily into the chess-match paradigm. Syria is about rival oil pipeline routes. Iraq and Libya were about global banking dependency. Iran is about control of the Suez Canal. The Ukraine war is both about oil pipelines and creating an “Israel” on Russia’s border – meaning a heavily militarized forward base to represent Western interests on a mostly hostile frontier.
It is also about gaining a tighter political and economic grip on Europe through energy dependency, of which the U.S. destruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline was an essential component: to prevent a Russian/German economic alliance that would have also supplied all of Europe with cheap, abundant energy.
U.S. domestic policy is being heavily affected by these geopolitical moves. For example, I contend that the sudden move to ban natural gas stoves is to free more supply for Europe, which is building gigantic transfer terminals to receive liquified natural gas from U.S. tankers to offset the loss from Russia (none of which is getting U.S. media coverage).
Indeed, the entire frantic “climate crisis” over carbon emissions – while also a means of increasing globalists power – seems to be an acknowledgment by “our” elites that the BRICS alliance might very well wrest control of the oil-based global economy away from us, and we need to be positioned to survive a global ban on carbon-based fuels that we would attempt to impose as a counter-measure. While that goal may prove unattainable given the growing clout of the BRICS alliance, it does at least provide an emerging narrative theme to justify future wars and police actions to “save the planet” from “criminally carbon-spewing nations.”
This chess-game framework also explains why we’re being conditioned to prepare for a Great Reset. We already have no ability to pay back China and other holders of our massive debt, but that problem will become exponentially worse if/when the dollar loses its globally exclusive reserve currency status. The best chance for retaining our hegemony would be the announcement of a global debt jubilee in conjunction with the launch of a completely new economic system which we control. Think of the Great Reset like geopolitical chemotherapy: a dose of poison designed to kill off the “cancer” in the world (i.e., non-submissive regimes), which theoretically would not kill the host body in the process but leave it stronger in the end.
As much as the extreme moral degeneracy of our elites makes the thought of a new global order more appealing, I don’t think BRICS can beat the West in this worsening conflict, and I believe the example of Brazil shows why. Brazil’s recently coup-reinstalled President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is as much a creation of the American left as any of our homegrown blue-state tyrants, but he’s also a highly ambitious political animal who presumably would rather not be under the American thumb. He was one of the original founders of BRICS and is the only one of the original heads of state who were in the coalition at its founding.
The BRICS threat to U.S. hegemony during Lula’s first administration was nominal, but by last month’s meeting in South Africa it was massive and growing. Lula’s participation in that meeting suggests to me he now is either serving as a U.S. mole in the BRICS leadership, or he believes BRICS represents a realistic opportunity to break his country free from U.S. control. Perhaps it was only for managing public perceptions but concurrent with the BRICS summit, the Brazilian Supreme Court (which staged the coup that reinstalled him) passed one of the world’s first anti-homophobia laws with actual criminal penalties.
That fascist law was a major bone for Lula to throw to the American leftists who helped rig the Brazilian election for him, in essence saying, “I’m still your boy.” But it also exposes the weakness of the glue holding BRICS together – the LGBT agenda is anathema to Russia and the other members. There is really nothing but a mutual desire to escape U.S. control that keeps them aligned – and THAT makes it extremely vulnerable to the British side of the Anglo-American pact, who are history’s greatest masters of “divide and conquer.” Watch and see.
To the painful personal side of this crisis, it was Lula who, during his first term in 2007 first attempted to criminalize pro-family activism, and my great friend and ally Julio Severo had to flee Brazil for the jungles of Guatemala after leading the defeat of the law. He, his wife and their seven children lived in exile there until he died in 2021. My ministry has ever since provided financial support to keep them together in one home, fed and clothed. My point is that global changes always hit the “little people” hardest – but being aware of what’s really going on helps us to better prepare and adapt.
Note: To help Julio Severo’s widow and children survive and get their legal status resolved, donate here using the Emergency Help for the Severo Family option. To help carry on Julio’s work defending the biblical standard for marriage and family against LGBT bullying, choose the “Carry on his work” option.
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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.