(The Epoch Times)—The United States agreed a $330 million deal for the sale of fighter jets and other aircraft parts to Taiwan on Nov. 13 in the first such deal since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, prompting anger from China.
The announcement of the proposed arms deal follows last month’s meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea in a diplomatic bid to secure a trade deal amid the ongoing tariff war between the world’s two largest economies.
Red Line
Beijing claims Taiwan as its own territory. Beijing’s foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian told reporters that the Chinese regime’s claim over Taiwan is at the core of China’s interests and is a red line that must not be crossed in China–U.S. relations.
He said the arms sale undermines Beijing’s sovereignty and security interests, sending what he called a “wrong signal” to Taiwan’s leaders.
The United States cut official ties with Taipei in 1979. While Washington has formal diplomatic ties with Beijing, its ties with Taiwan remain unofficial as the island nation maintains its own democratic government, military, and distinct way of life.
The United States is the main supplier of arms to the island nation and is bound by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself.
‘Cornerstone of Peace’
The Pentagon said in a statement that the proposed sale will improve Taiwan’s “capability to meet current and future threats by maintaining the operational readiness of the recipient’s fleet of F-16, C-130,” and other aircraft.
“The deepening of the Taiwan-U.S. security partnership is an important cornerstone of peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region,” Taiwan’s presidential office spokesperson Karen Kuo said in a statement, noting the arms sale was the first announced by the current administration.
The statement thanked Washington for continuing its policy of regularized arms sales to Taiwan and supporting the island in enhancing its defense capabilities.
The deal, expected to take effect within a month, will help maintain the air force’s fighter readiness and bolster air defenses, strengthen resilience, and enhance the nation’s ability to respond to China’s “gray-zone” incursions, Taiwan’s defense ministry said.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has not ruled out the use of force to take control of the island.
Taiwan’s government strongly refutes Beijing’s sovereignty claims.
Trump said in August that Xi told him he would not invade Taiwan while the Republican leader remains in office.
He made the comments in an interview with Fox News, ahead of a planned talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the Russia–Ukraine war.
“I don’t believe there’s any way it’s going to happen as long as I’m here,” Trump said of a potential invasion of the island nation.
“He told me, ‘I will never do it as long as you’re president,’” Trump said, regarding Xi.
“But he also said, ‘But I am very patient, and China is very patient.’”
Trump said he told Xi, “Well, that’s up to you, but it better not happen now.”
Chinese Premier Li Qiang said in March that China planned to pursue the “reunification” of Taiwan and would oppose external interference. The CCP has never ruled Taiwan.
Military Exercises
The CCP’s military stages regular exercises in the waters and airspace around Taiwan, which the government in Taipei regards as a way of putting pressure on the island, while stopping short of actual combat.
Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te has repeatedly offered to have talks with China, but Beijing has refused, calling him a “separatist.”
The history between China and Taiwan is long and complex. The island nation, with an estimated population of around 23.9 million to China’s 1.4 billion, is known officially as the Republic of China, and most nations only recognize it unofficially.
Taiwan, which uses the official name the Republic of China (ROC) as shown on its citizens’ passports, is the last territory of the republic that also ruled mainland China from 1911 to 1949.
After being defeated by the CCP in 1949 on the mainland, the ROC’s nationalist government, led by Chiang Kai-shek, retreated to the island of Taiwan, which was returned to China from Japanese occupation in 1945. The Republic of China has remained Taiwan’s official name since then. Meanwhile, the CCP established the communist regime, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), on the mainland in 1949.
Polling in Taiwan consistently shows that the vast majority favors the status quo, with younger people more in favor of declaring full independence from China. In a poll from earlier this year, 82.5 percent of respondents rejected Beijing’s claim that “Taiwan is part of China’s territory.”
Reuters contributed to this report
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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.