(The Epoch Times)—President Donald Trump wrapped up a whirlwind 24-hour visit to the Netherlands on June 25 for the NATO summit, securing a significant agreement to increase defense spending commitments from allies.
In contrast to last year’s summit, hosted by President Joe Biden in Washington amid scrutiny following his debate performance against Trump, this year’s event reflected a notable shift in tone and priorities.
During the summit, attention focused on Trump’s remarks about the Middle East cease-fire, a leaked intelligence report about U.S. military strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, and his position on the Russia–Ukraine conflict.
Here are the key takeaways from this year’s summit.
‘Historic Milestone’
At this year’s summit, NATO allies agreed to dramatically increase their defense spending targets to 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a plan that Trump has long championed.
During a news conference at the summit, Trump hailed the new agreement, known as the Hague Defense Commitment, as a “historic milestone”—something, he said, “no one really thought possible.”
According to the summit statement, NATO members agreed to allocate at least 3.5 percent of their GDP annually to core defense requirements by 2035. Members agreed to submit annual plans showing a credible path to reaching this goal.
In addition, NATO members will spend a further 1.5 percent of their GDP annually to invest in critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, civil preparedness, and innovation, and to boost the defense industrial base.
Trump said that the defense commitment will add more than $1 trillion a year to NATO’s collective defense.
He said he wanted the new money to be spent on military hardware and not bureaucracy.
“Hopefully, that hardware is going to be made in America, because we have the best hardware in the world,” he said, promoting the U.S. defense industry, poised to be the main beneficiary of the increased defense spending.
Iran Looms Large at Summit
While the summit was expected to be Trump’s moment to celebrate recent U.S. strikes that destroyed three of Iran’s nuclear facilities, the president spent much of his time pushing back against news reports that cast doubt on the military operation’s success.
During the news conference at the summit, Trump said that the reports demeaned the pilots, including those flying B-2 bombers, who took part in the military operation over the weekend.
Trump criticized CNN and other media outlets for reporting that a leaked classified U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that the strikes did not destroy critical components of the nation’s nuclear program.
In response, Trump cited a statement from Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, who claimed that the country’s nuclear installations were “badly damaged” by the attacks.
During his meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on the morning of June 25, Trump also said the U.S. strikes helped end the Israel–Iran conflict, likening them to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings that ended World War II.
Trump–Rutte Dynamics
At the Hague summit, the relationship between Trump and the NATO secretary-general was particularly notable.
Rutte praised Trump’s leadership in pushing NATO allies to ramp up defense spending and lauded his “decisive action” in dismantling Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.
During their bilateral meeting on the morning of June 25, Trump likened the Israel–Iran conflict to “a big fight” between “two kids in a schoolyard.”
“You know, they fight like hell, you can’t stop them. Let them fight for about 2 to 3 minutes, then it’s easy to stop them,” Trump said.
Rutte responded with a quip, saying, “Then daddy has to sometimes use strong language.”
The exchange quickly went viral, with critics accusing the NATO chief of being excessively flattering toward Trump.
Rutte defended his remarks, calling Trump “a good friend” and adding, “I think he deserves all the praise.”
Trump Meets With Zelenskyy
Another key highlight of the summit was Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on June 25 on the sidelines. When asked if he had discussed a potential cease-fire, Trump told reporters, “No, I just wanted to know how he’s doing.”
“It was very nice, actually. We had a little rough times,” Trump said. “He couldn’t have been nicer.”
Trump expressed his intention to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin to explore ways to broker a cease-fire. He didn’t comment on whether he still considered plans to impose additional sanctions on Russia.
European leaders had hoped that Trump would follow through on his earlier pledge to enact secondary sanctions on the Kremlin, but that expectation appears to be on hold for now.
The summit’s communiqué also reflected a shift in language. The 2024 statement declared, “Ukraine’s future is in NATO.” This has been replaced with, “Allies reaffirm their enduring sovereign commitments to provide support to Ukraine, whose security contributes to ours.”
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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.