President Trump, Treasury secretary Bessent, and Commerce secretary Lutnick are effectively teaching a course right now on the fundamentals of international trade. How many Americans previously understood that nations around the world use tariffs and other economic tools to keep American-made products from reaching their markets? Hasn’t the United States been spreading the gospel of “free trade” for centuries?
Doesn’t commitment to “free markets” separate the civilizational West from more authoritarian countries with “closed” economies? Shouldn’t a “rules-based international order” ensure that the rules are the same for all participating countries?
Or asked another way: How “free” can international trade be if its proponents depend upon a labyrinthine system of rules that requires thousand-page treaties and guidance from the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, central banks galore, the Bank for International Settlements, international standards organizations, law firms specializing in commercial and maritime law, more law firms specializing in the administrative law of specific nations, even more law firms specializing in the labor and environmental laws of each nation, and an ever-increasing number of national and international regulatory bodies to tell producers what they can and cannot produce, how and when to produce what they are permitted to produce, and whom to pay for the “privilege” of producing it — all while restricting which domestic consumers around the world are permitted to purchase what the aforementioned producers end up producing?
That long question only scratches the surface of the sheer complexity of international trade, yet even in its oversimplification, it smacks of coercion, extortion, overbearing micromanagement, government corruption, and blatant racketeering. It oozes the “command and control” odor we associate with a Soviet-type, socialist, or similarly centrally planned economy. Nothing about “free trade” in practice sounds remotely free.
With the Trump/Bessent/Lutnick tariff tutorial currently being broadcast from the White House, millions of Americans are learning for the first time that the United States operates within an international market system that does not impose reciprocal entry costs. That is to say, countries around the world collect fees from American producers before they are allowed to sell their goods in those markets, while the U.S. typically charges foreign producers much less — or nothing at all.
Since the conclusion of WWII, the United States has directly subsidized Europe through various forms of a Marshall Plan, originally meant to help Europe rebuild after the war by restricting American competitors from selling in Europe while encouraging European producers to sell in the United States. Was the Marshall Plan necessary to resurrect Europe’s economy? Perhaps — although many economists have argued that it so distorted market incentives that Europe’s economy is much less strong today than it otherwise would be. Regardless, most Americans have been intentionally kept in the dark that this two-tiered system of trans-Atlantic trade has persisted for eighty years.
Europe is not alone in benefiting from “rules-based” trade advantages with the United States. The U.S. handcuffs its producers in numerous ways. If some country within America’s sphere of influence depends upon a particular agricultural crop or mineral export to sustain its national standard of living, then there is almost certainly a paragraph tucked away in the thirteenth section of the fifty-ninth chapter of some fourteen-hundred-page international treaty making it more difficult for American producers to grow, mine, ship, or sell that product to the other country’s detriment.
That’s one form of what foreign policy snobs like to call “soft power.” It’s a way for the United States to exert influence by effectively saying, “If you do what we say, we’ll prop up your nation’s economy. And if you’re really obedient, the U.S. Agency for International Development or the National Endowment for Democracy will throw a little cold, hard cash at your political leaders.”
Now, if you’re building empires, that might be a splendid tactic. It is an inexpensive way to expand American power around the world. It fosters the image that the United States respects the sovereignty of individual nation-states while creating the conditions for the U.S. government to hold a nation’s economic future in its hands. No doubt many of the countries that have flourished under America’s security umbrella are far better off today than they would have been had they become vassal states to the Soviet Union last century or communist China this century. Nonetheless, this kind of manipulation of international trade comes at a cost to any American farmer or entrepreneur who is hamstrung due to the State Department’s “soft power” games.
There is a strange — and perhaps quite dangerous — disconnect between the way most Americans see their country and the way the U.S. government actually operates. A reasonable, patriotic American believes that the United States is a great and powerful country with unique influence on the world stage. Yet citizens still see it as a nation with distinct borders, a distinct culture, distinct interests, and a distinct Constitution that limits federal powers while ensuring that the American people are ably represented in their government.
The U.S. government, on the other hand, sees itself as the international headquarters of a global empire that has no borders; includes all cultures; pursues competing interests; acts without constitutional constraint; and represents international banks, corporations, and institutions with no allegiance to the political culture, historical inheritance, or territorial sovereignty of the United States.
The result of this disconnect is striking: While the American people expect their government to do what’s best for them and their country, the U.S. government does what’s best for itself and the expansion of its empire. If international companies can profit from illegal immigration, then the federal government will ignore its own immigration laws and even fly illegal aliens into the United States. If international banks can profit from slave labor manufacturing in communist China, then the federal government will outsource entire industries to its geopolitical enemy. If the European Union and the World Economic Forum can use U.S. military and economic support to create totalitarian systems of control across the continent, then the federal government will spend itself to financial death in order to sustain the “New World Order’s” globalist hegemony.
Americans didn’t vote for open borders, endless wars, forty trillion dollars of debt, or a hollowed out economy dependent on overseas slave labor. The U.S. government ignored their wishes and the limits of its constitutional powers and constructed a global empire anyway.
In truth, the American empire hasn’t been interested in “free trade” since at least WWI. The Great War, coincidentally enough, started roughly six months after the Federal Reserve System was forced upon the American public in a corrupt congressional vote two days before Christmas 1913. The creation of a “central bank” was a dead giveaway that markets would henceforth be controlled. Nothing that is centralized can be said to operate according to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” From that point on, central bankers chose the “winners” and “losers” in the American economy, and “free trade” became a euphemism that global oligarchs whispered to the American people while stealing every last cent from their pockets.
Before the Federal Reserve, Americans had gold-backed currency, owned real property, paid little in taxes, and moved up the social ladder faster than anywhere else in the world. Since the imposition of a central bank, fiat dollars have lost most of their value, banks own most Americans’ homes, American tax obligations have exploded, and indebted workers are less well off than their parents.
President Trump’s tariff policy is only the beginning. He is setting the stage for the end of the income tax, the IRS, and the Federal Reserve. Getting there requires unshackling the American economy and unleashing Americans’ entrepreneurial spirit.
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.
