(The Epoch Times)—Secretary of War Pete Hegseth articulated the emerging “America First” national defense strategy of President Donald Trump’s second term in a keynote speech before the 2025 Reagan National Defense Forum on Dec. 6.
“The War Department will not be distracted by democracy-building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing, and feckless nation-building,” he said.
“We will instead put our nation’s practical, concrete interests first.”
Hegseth said the Pentagon would support this foreign policy approach by bolstering U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere, deterring China, shifting burdens in other areas of the globe onto regional allies and partners, and overhauling the U.S. arms industry.
The secretary of war’s policy remarks largely mirrored a new national security strategy the White House laid out on Dec. 5. His remarks also serve as a preview of a more detailed national defense strategy that the Pentagon is preparing.
At times throughout his remarks, Hegseth drew parallels between Trump and the forum’s namesake, President Ronald Reagan. He cast Trump as the “rightful heir” to Reagan’s legacy.
“It’s President Trump who has inherited and restored President Reagan’s powerful but focused and realistic approach to national defense,” he said.
Shifting Global Priorities
As he laid out the emerging burden-sharing strategy, Hegseth called for allies and partners around the world to embrace their martial heritage.
“Our allies are not children; they’re nations capable of doing far more for themselves than they have,” he told the Reagan National Defense Forum.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration pressed NATO members to commit 5 percent of their annual gross domestic product to military and defense.
Along with burden-sharing in Europe, Hegseth called for a balancing of responsibilities with partners in the Indo-Pacific region to check the ambitions of communist China. Hegseth said the United States is not trying to dominate or humiliate China.
With allies and partners taking on more responsibility for the security in their respective corners of the world, Trump is seeking to place more focus back on the Americas.
The Trump administration’s growing focus on the Western Hemisphere, which the White House has called the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, calls for U.S. forces to target transnational cartels and help block illegal immigration and drug trafficking into the United States.
Already, U.S. forces have conducted numerous lethal strikes on suspected drug boats operating in the waterways around South America and Central America and Trump has raised the prospect of additional U.S. military operations on land-based targets.
“The Monroe Doctrine is in effect, and it is stronger than ever under the Trump Corollary: a commonsense restoration of our power and prominence in this hemisphere,” Hegseth told the forum.
Senate Democrats, along with Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), challenged the recent U.S. strikes near Latin America and sought to limit further military operations in the region absent their authorization. The measure failed in a 49–51 vote.
The operations have faced additional scrutiny in recent days, after The Washington Post reported that Hegseth ordered follow-up attacks on the stranded survivors of a Sept. 2 strike that targeted a suspected drug boat. Amid the furor, Hegseth said that he was not directly involved in the follow-up strike decision but that he backed the commander of the operation, Navy Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley.
Lawmakers called Bradley to testify about the Sept. 2 strike in a closed-door setting on Dec. 4. They remain divided over the incident.
In an earlier panel discussion at the Reagan National Defense Forum on Dec. 6, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, said he is supportive of efforts to halt drug trafficking through the region but harbors concerns about the recent operations.
“I want to stop the drugs,“ Smith said. ”I’m not sure that this is exactly the best way to go about doing it, and the legality of it does matter.
“I mean, President Trump has decided that we’re going to have the death penalty for drug dealers, and he’s going to be judge, jury, and executioner with no due process, no probable cause, and no congressional approval.”
Throughout his keynote speech, Hegseth rebuffed critics of the ongoing military operations in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific.
“Our borders shouldn’t be the first line of defense for the American homeland,” he said. “They should be the last line of defense. And that’s why we’re prioritizing our fight against cartels throughout the Western Hemisphere.”
Revamping Armsmaking
Calls to overhaul the U.S. arms industry are not new to the Trump administration.
Amid fighting in Ukraine and numerous flashpoint conflicts across the Middle East in recent years, strategists and policymakers have raised concerns as to whether the U.S. arms industry can meet the demand for existing weapons and innovate to keep pace with evolving threats on the battlefield.
In the past year, the Pentagon has halted the M10 Booker light tank and Constellation-class frigate programs amid cost concerns and disagreements over the requirements for the two programs.
In November, Hegseth laid out a series of reforms the Pentagon will pursue to improve the arms acquisition process and bolster the domestic arms industry.
“President Trump is hell-bent on maintaining and accelerating the most powerful military the world has ever seen; the most powerful, the most lethal, and most American-made,“ Hegseth said on Dec. 6. ”The arsenal of freedom.”
The day before his Reagan National Defense Forum remarks, Hegseth toured defense industry facilities across Southern California.
At his first stop, the secretary of war toured the Anduril Industries corporate campus in Costa Mesa, California. There, he saw an under-construction unmanned fighter jet known as the YFQ-44 Fury, which the Air Force is considering for its Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. Anduril also showcased its Dive-XL underwater autonomous vehicle and its EagleEye augmented reality helmet display.
Anduril’s founder, Palmer Luckey, said his company seeks to simplify the manufacturing process for many of its weapons, moving away from exquisite but hard-to-make systems and toward ones that can be rapidly produced and improved.
“We’ve designed a lot of our systems to be manufactured by the types of machines and the types of skillsets … that you would see in the automotive industry,” Luckey said.
During his visit to the Anduril facility, Hegseth praised the company’s approach to innovation.
“We’re going to compete, we’re going to move fast, we’re going to do open architecture, we’re going to innovate, we’re going to scale, and we’re going to do it at cost,“ he said. ”I think I just described the mission of Anduril.”
After his Anduril tour, Hegseth stopped at a manufacturing facility operated by Hadrian in Torrance, California. The company operates highly automated factories to produce precision parts for aerospace and defense industry partners.
During Hegseth’s visit, Hadrian showcased its production process, inviting the secretary to load an aluminum block into a computer numerical control mill to assemble a test component for a satellite.
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.
