(DCNF)—Secretary of State Marco Rubio has wasted no time in reshaping a decades-long foreign policy approach that’s paid “scarce attention” to America’s backyard and opened the door to China as a result.
Rubio, whose interest in Latin America was a key talking point in his nomination to his role in the State Department, made a blitz of visits and diplomatic actions to various nations in the region to secure American interests early during the administration, most recently extracting Venezuelan opposition members to the U.S. from the regime’s grasp. As the Trump administration turns its attention to issues like immigration, fentanyl trafficking and curtailing Chinese influence globally, Rubio has become one of Trump’s key liaisons in the region.
“Rubio is paying far more attention to our hemisphere than previous Secretary of State’s already with just the number of visits to the region,” Andres Martinez Fernandez, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Particularly under the Biden administration, very little scarce attention to our hemisphere. I think it was really a dangerously low level of engagement.”
During his visit to Panama, Rubio spoke with Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino to emphasize that China’s influence in the Panama Canal was unacceptable, saying the U.S. would be ready to respond if the status quo did not change.
China has significant influence in the Panama Canal, owning two ports on either side of the critical seaway. American investment firm Blackrock had planned to buy the ports off of China for $23 billion, but the deal has since been delayed due to Chinese hesitance and Panamanian scrutiny. Additionally, China’s Landbridge Group acquired Panama’s largest Atlantic port, Margarita Island, for $900 million in 2016.
Panama, in response to Rubio and the Trump administration’s pressure, gave U.S. warships the ability to travel “first and free” through the canal while increasing U.S. troop presence in its many military installations in the nation.
“For decades, out of all the regions in the world, our own region has received the least consistent attention from U.S. policymakers,” Rubio wrote in an April 2024 column for The National Interest. “This cannot continue if we want security, prosperity, and freedom to win out in the Western Hemisphere.”
Further down south from Panama, Rubio and the Trump administration have applied pressure on the socialist state of Venezuela.
Rubio oversaw the rescue of five Venezuelan opposition members that were trapped in the Argentine Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, after the government charged them with conspiring against President Nicolas Maduro. The five persons had close ties with opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who supported former presidential candidate Edmundo González in the 2024 election.
The election was highly controversial due to the government’s denial of the results and the subsequent persecution of González, who fled to Spain to escape Maduro’s influence.
Rubio openly called the Maduro regime “illegitimate” after the rescue, saying the dictator’s actions have “undermined Venezuela’s institutions, violated human rights, and endangered our regional security.”
“I think what Secretary Rubio is doing with President Trump is placing pressure on the regime while engaging collectively in efforts to protect Americans, secure American interests and isolate the capacity of the regime to disrupt U.S. security,” Fernandez told the DCNF. “It’s a tough situation, and there’s some major challenges for us.”
Rubio has also moved to solidify America’s ties with Caribbean nations and sound the alarm over Cuba’s human rights abuses. Additionally, China has reportedly set up at least four spy bases in the communist island nation, some of which are equipped with signal intelligence equipment used to intercept communications from a target location.
The secretary met with the heads of state of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Prime Saint Lucia, Grenada and Saint Kitts and Nevis to discuss continued partnership while singling out Cuba as a target of further containment in early May.
Some observers have compared Rubio’s posture in Latin America to the Monroe Doctrine, first coined during the presidency of James Monroe, which emphasized American domination of the Western Hemisphere and the exclusion of Europe from the region.
Now, as America deals with a novel foe in China, Fernandez thinks the comparison is fair, but with key differences in the modern world.
“If the goal is to protect and assert U.S. interests within our own hemisphere, that at the end of the day, that’s the core of the Monroe Doctrine,” Fernandez told the DCNF.
Illegal immigration has become a key focal point of the administration’s diplomatic outreach in the region, such as cooperating with El Salvador to house deported criminal migrants in the maximum security CECOT prison. Rubio met with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in February to solidify agreements to help stem the illegal immigration crisis.
“Secretary Rubio knows first-hand the important role our region plays in the America First foreign policy agenda,” a senior State Department official told the DCNF. “He was intentional in his selection to visit many countries in our hemisphere during his first international trip.”
“Whether it be working with regional allies to deter illegal immigration, designating cartels and gangs as Foreign Terrorist Organizations or holding tyrannical regimes accountable, Secretary Rubio remains focused on making America safer, stronger, and more prosperous,” the official added.
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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.
