(The Daily Caller News Foundation)—The Biden administration has reversed or is considering reversing several of its foreign policies to mirror those implemented under the Trump administration.
The Biden administration most recently reversed policies that allowed funding to a major United Nations agency, mirroring an approach taken by the Trump administration against the agency in 2018. A similar reversal occurred earlier in January when the Biden administration re-designated an extremist Islamic militia group as a global terrorist organization, a label that the administration had previously removed from the group in 2021.
The U.S. and a number of allied nations cut funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) after it was discovered on Friday that several of the agency’s staffers were involved in the Hamas Oct. 7 attacks against Israel. It was later revealed that over a thousand UNRWA staffers have ties to Hamas or Islamic terror groups.
The UN is taking swift action following the extremely serious allegations against several UNRWA staff. These abhorrent alleged acts must have consequences. But the humanitarian needs of the desperate populations UNRWA serves must be met – @antonioguterres https://t.co/gy7cthapRa
— UN Spokesperson (@UN_Spokesperson) January 28, 2024
The Trump administration had cut funding for UNRWA in 2018 because it felt the agency was an “irredeemably flawed operation,” according to a State Department press release from the time. The administration was also frustrated because it had to “shoulder the very disproportionate share of the burden of UNRWA’s costs,” as the U.S. has historically been the largest financial backer of the agency.
When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, his administration quickly reversed the decision and began funding UNRWA to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The Biden administration criticized the Trump administration for harming the Palestinian population when it cut funding for UNRWA.
Since the start of Biden’s presidency, the U.S. has contributed over a billion dollars to UNRWA. Funding for UNRWA was ground to a halt again on Friday pending an investigation into the agency’s ties to terrorism.
The Biden administration also in January reversed its decision to remove the Houthis, an Iranian-backed terrorist group based in Yemen, from its global terrorist list. The Trump administration designated the Houthis as a terrorist organization in January 2021, but this label later was removed by the Biden administration shortly after Biden took office.
The Biden administration said it removed the Houthis from its terror lists because it was concerned about what negative humanitarian impacts the label would have on Yemen. The terrorist group ramped up its aggression both in and outside of Yemen after being removed from the list.
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The Houthis continue to play a significant in ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, with the terror group carrying out attacks against commercial vessels in a key Red Sea shipping route, resulting in negative impacts on global markets.
The Biden administration returned the Houthis to its “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” list in January over the group’s increasing violence and aggression in the Middle East. the same designation the group was hit with by the Trump administration in 2021.
Today, we announced the designation of the Houthis as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group. pic.twitter.com/NFYOaUrm8G
— Department of State (@StateDept) January 17, 2024
The Biden administration is now considering easing up on some restrictions for sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, The New York Times reported in December. Trump and his administration boasted during his tenure that the U.S.-Saudi relationship was strong, and one aspect of that relationship was an arms deal that involved selling billions of dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
The Biden administration took a more hardline approach to Saudi Arabia, imposing restrictions on the sale of weapons to the country in 2021 over concerns about their use, according to NYT. The administration was also vocally concerned over the 2018 death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which U.S. intelligence concluded was orchestrated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).
Biden himself was highly critical of Saudi Arabia during the 2020 election cycle, promising to end the arms deal and make the country “the pariah that they are” when he was elected.
“I would make it very clear we were not going to in fact sell more weapons to them. … We were going to in fact make them pay the price, and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are,” Biden said during a Democratic presidential debate in 2019, noting the country had “very little social redeeming value in the present government.”
The Biden administration is now considering loosening certain restrictions on weapons sales to the Saudis, according to NYT. The Saudi government has expressed concern to U.S. officials that it needs to be properly armed to deter threats from terror and militia groups in the Middle East region.
A formal announcement on whether the ban will be lifted has not yet been made.
The White House and State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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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.