(Zero Hedge)—Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Washington on Wednesday, U.S. Vice President JD Vance stated that America’s security posture of the past 20 years is no longer sufficient for the challenges of the next two decades. He emphasized the need for the U.S. to rethink and modernize its national defense strategy to address emerging global threats, including a world fracturing into a bipolar state and the weaponization of supply chains by foreign adversaries.
During a question-and-answer session at the Munich Security Conference, Wolfgang Ischinger—the former German ambassador to the U.S. and longtime chair of the conference—asked VP Vance whether the Trump administration sees the U.S. as a continued “European power.”
The vice president’s response reaffirmed that the U.S. and Europe remain fundamentally aligned, describing them as part of the same “civilizational team.” While acknowledging that he’s often labeled a “hyper-realist” focused on transactional foreign policy and emphasized that his view of the U.S.-Europe relationship goes beyond mere interests—highlighting shared cultural and historical ties.
He noted that disagreements are inevitable but stressed the need for transatlantic cooperation, particularly in rethinking defense strategies for the next 20 years, well into the 2030s. Vance also called for greater European burden-sharing, arguing that the current security posture is outdated and must evolve.
Here is Vance’s full, unedited response:
And, yeah, I do still very much think that the United States and Europe are on the same team. And I I think that this is, you know, sometimes I’ve been criticized as a hyper realist, right? I think of foreign policy purely in terms of transactional values.
What does the America get out of it? What do the you know rest of the world get out of it? And and try to you know focus so purely on the transactional value of it that we ignore sometimes the humanitarian or the moral side of it. And I think at least with Europe that’s actually not a full encapsulation of my views because I think that you know European civilization and American civilization, European culture and American culture are very much linked and they’re always going to be linked and I I think it’s it’s completely ridiculous to think that you’re ever going to be able to drive a firm wedge between the United States and Europe.
Now that doesn’t mean we’re not going to have disagreements and of course you know you brought up the speech earlier. It doesn’t mean that Europeans won’t criticize the United States or the United States won’t criticize Europe.
But I do think fundamentally we have to be and we are on the same civilizational team. And I think obviously there’s a big question about what that means in the 21st century. I think you know obviously the president and I believe that it means a little bit more Europe European burden sharing on the defense side. I think that it means that all of us frankly on both sides of the Atlantic have gotten a little bit uh too comfortable with the security posture of the last 20 years and that frankly that security posture is not adequate to meet the challenges of the next 20 years.
So there are a lot of ways in which this alliance will evolve and change in the same way that the alliance evolved and changed from 1945 to 1975 and from 1975 to 2005. I do think that we’re in one of these phases where we’re going to have to rethink a lot of big questions, but I do think that we should rethink those big questions together.
Vance is signaling a pivot in defense policy, suggesting that the post-9/11 era focus on counterterrorism and regional conflicts (like Iraq and Afghanistan) has now pivoted towards state-driven threats, particularly from China, Russia, Iran, and non-traditional domains such as:
- Cyber warfare
- Artificial intelligence
- Space militarization
- Supply chain vulnerabilities
- Nuclear and hypersonic weapons
The worldview that President Trump has is for greater coordination of national and hemispheric defense across the Americas, hence the push for stronger economic integration between the U.S. and Canada, coupled with a hardened defense perimeter stretching from the Arctic to the Panama Canal.
Steve Bannon previously said it’s all about “hemispheric control,” noting that a new era of hemispheric defense across the Americas will begin once Trump delivers peace in Eastern Europe.
3/3
“He is going to make a deal with Russia that we can finally counterbalance the CCP and bring peace and then have hemispheric defense here in Europe and Paris. https://t.co/vmJHFnTDlu pic.twitter.com/X3T63GnAJ0— ?????™️ (@BonVangUFO) February 19, 2025
Bolstering hemispheric defense may involve President Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” defense system. A recent Congressional Budget Office report states that developing this missile defense network could cost $542 billion over 20 years.
Arthur Herman recently penned in the National Interest how “pooling US-Canada resources from energy to AI to defense would be a boon for global and hemispheric security.” In other words, a US-Canada “superstate” could emerge in the 2030s that will be enough to handle all the threats the world throws at it.
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.
