(DCNF)—Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro has put himself directly in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, but war remains unlikely at this point in time, foreign policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has taken multiple steps to ramp up pressure on Maduro’s regime, including flying strategic bombers off Venezuela’s coast and reportedly authorizing the CIA to conduct covert operations in the nation. These moves, which on the surface look like open provocations to a potential future conflict, seek to pressure the regime in much the same way Trump did during his first term, experts told the DCNF.
“I don’t see an intervention on the horizon,” Daniel Batlle, Latin America and Caribbean expert and fellow at the Hudson Institute, told the DCNF. “I don’t think that the U.S. has laid the groundwork for Panama-style intervention in Venezuela. I think what the administration is trying to do is send a signal to the regime that is intended to keep it on the defensive, but it [also] wants to have options for pressuring Maduro.”
Maduro reportedly offered the Trump administration a majority stake in Venezuela’s oil and mineral assets during months of informal talks, according to the New York Times. The offer went nowhere, however, and was effectively killed when President Trump severed all diplomatic contact with the dictator on Oct. 2.
President Donald Trump said October 17 that Maduro did not want to “fuck around with the United States” and that he had “offered everything.”
Venezuela plays host to multiple drug cartels, such as Tren de Aragua, which originated from a brutal prison in Venezuela and made its way to American shores under the Biden administration. The U.S. has accused Maduro of being deeply involved in the operations of the Cartel de los Soles, which was one of the initial reasons given for sanctions and deployments to the southern Caribbean.
Trump’s strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific have had the double effect of pressuring Venezuela while also stopping drugs from moving onto U.S. shores. However, cartels are now making changes to their playbook in order to circumvent the new military presence, hiding cargo on civilian ships and using plane drops to evade U.S. Navy fleets.
“They are weakest at sea and reliant on moving cargo that way. That’s not to say the Cartels won’t try to adapt. They did before during changes in interdiction methods years ago,” Brent Sadler, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF. “This campaign will take time and is a function of how prepared to weather the attacks the Cartels are and how long/effective the interdictions of their shipments remain.”
The military deployments have not merely been to deter cartels from shipping product by sea. The U.S. has also dispatched multiple bombers to patrol off the shores of Venezuela as a “show of force” towards Maduro.
B-52 Stratofortress long-range bombers out of Louisiana patrolled off the Venezuelan coast earlier this month, and on Thursday, B-1 Lancer strategic long-range bombers took off from Texas flew close to the nation’s coast in international airspace.
Despite the build-up, Batlle still thinks it unlikely that a full-scale war is imminent, since such a move would require far more assets than are currently at the ready.
“The military assets we have in the Caribbean are much more robust than what you need to do, to strike drug boats,” Batlle told the DCNF. “But to go from there to saying that we have the forces needed for an intervention in Venezuela I think is a stretch.”
Adding to those assets, the Pentagon on Friday authorized deployment of the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group and its embarked carrier air wing to the U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) area of responsibility (AOR), which encompasses most of Central and South America and adjacent waters, including the Caribbean and Gulf of America.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt deferred to Trump’s comments when asked by the Daily Caller whether regime change in Venezuela is an end goal of the ongoing campaign against the cartels.
Daily Caller’s @reaganreese_: “I’m wondering if the end goal of this narco-terrorist war is to implement a regime change in Venezuela?” @PressSec ‘s response ? pic.twitter.com/R6JMBLBpJU
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) October 23, 2025
“President Trump has been clear about his priority to stop the scourge of narcoterrorism that has resulted in the needless deaths of innocent Americans,” a senior administration official told the DCNF. “As the President clearly stated, he has not had any discussions on regime change.”
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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.
