(Daily Signal)—The leader of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, is now in U.S. custody and appeared in federal court in New York on Monday, two days after the U.S. military captured him. The operation that ousted him will have deep and lasting implications not only for Venezuela, but also nations that aligned themselves with Maduro’s regime, according to policy experts.
Maduro’s arrest is a “disaster” for the “Axis of Evil, these kinds of hostile, anti-American countries,” according to Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security advisor to President Donald Trump, and the vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
Cuba, China, Iran, and Russia stand to lose the most from Maduro’s capture, Coates and other foreign policy experts said.
China
The capture of Maduro has shattered “China’s dream” of dominating the “purchase of Venezuelan oil over the next 10 to 20 years,” explains Michael Pillsbury, author of “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.”
China had offered to further develop and update Venezuela’s oil infrastructure to “then pump most of it … for themselves,” Pillsbury said.
Now, U.S. companies are expected to enter Venezuela to further develop the nation’s oil infrastructure, leaving China dependent on the U.S. to continue the flow of oil out of Venezuela to the Chinese Communist Party.
China “will get oil, but not at the cheap rates anymore,” explains Gordon G. Chang, a China expert and author of “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America.”
“Venezuela was essentially China’s proxy in Latin America, and now that relationship is gone,” Chang told The Daily Signal.
Multiple Chinese leaders, including President Xi Jinping, denounced the U.S. arrest of Maduro on Saturday.
While China is the nation with the “second most to lose from the end of the regime,” Chang says that Cuba has the most to lose.
Cuba
Cuban and Venezuelan leaders built a relationship between the two nations over decades, starting with Hugo Chávez, who came to power in Venezuela in 1999. Fidel Castro, the former dictatorial leader of Cuba, once referred to Chávez as Cuba’s “best friend.”
Venezuela and Cuba have remained close both politically and economically under the Maduro regime, according to Andrés Martínez-Fernández, senior policy analyst for Latin America at The Heritage Foundation.
“Venezuela has been the main artery for the inflow of financing to Cuba in the form of oil, primarily, and that has enabled Cuba to weather a dramatic economic crisis, long-standing economic crisis, and social unrest,” Martínez-Fernández told The Daily Signal.
With Venezuelan oil expected to stop flowing to Cuba now that Maduro is no longer running the South American country, Cuba’s future is in “limbo,” the Heritage analyst says.
Miguel Díaz-Canel, the current leader of Cuba, was “visibly shaken” following Maduro’s capture, Martínez-Fernández said, adding that Cuba sent some of its nationals to Venezuela to protect Maduro. Cuba announced that 32 of its citizens were killed during the U.S. operation to capture Maduro.
“I think what we’re likely to see is a new wave of instability with the Cuban dictatorship and I expect, and hope in the near term, a full collapse and a restoration of freedom to Cuba,” Martínez-Fernández predicts.
Russia
While Cuba is expected to experience an economic blow from Maduro’s arrest, Russia stands to lose a strategic partner that is geographically close to the U.S.
Russia’s interest in Venezuela is linked to its relationship with Cuba, according to Heritage’s Coates.
“From a Russian standpoint, if you lose the communist regime in Cuba … you’re losing your major strategic foothold … so close to the United States, and that’s a huge problem for them,” Coates says of Russia.
Iran
Maduro’s arrest serves as a severe warning to the Iranian regime, according to Coates.
Major protests are currently taking place in Iran, driven largely by a water crisis. The protests are also occuring six months after the U.S. bombed three of Iran’s key nuclear sites, weakening the regime’s power position on the world stage.
Trump has spoken out in support of the Iranian protesters, who “may well be emboldened both by what they’re hearing out of President Trump … and what he just did to Maduro in Venezuela,” Coates said.
Trump says his administration is “watching” the protests in Iran closely, telling reporters on Sunday, “if they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States.”
Trump’s action against Maduro may cause the leaders of Iran to “think twice” before taking action against protesters, according to Asher Fredman, a visiting fellow at the Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation.
Venezuela has also “long enabled Hezbollah-linked illicit finance and terror networks,” Fredman explains.
“I think the regime would be very foolish if it did not take Trump’s threat seriously,” Fredman said, adding that Iran has lost a partner in the Western Hemisphere with Maduro’s capture.
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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.
