The most revealing moment of Wednesday’s House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing was not an accusation. It was an admission, and it came from our own ambassador.
Asked whether China uses United Nations peacekeeping deployments to gather intelligence, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz did not hedge. He said he doesn’t think for a second that Beijing’s blue helmets fail to serve a dual purpose as eyes and ears on the ground for the Chinese Communist Party. He added that the administration is watching every dimension of it, and that the rest would have to wait for a closed-door briefing.
That is a striking thing for a sitting ambassador to say out loud about a fellow permanent member of the Security Council. It is also, and this is the part nobody at the hearing seemed eager to sit with, roughly a decade late.
What the Lawmakers Actually Alleged
Rep. Sheri Biggs of South Carolina laid out the geographic pattern. Chinese peacekeeping deployments, she told the committee, cluster in strategically sensitive terrain — along Belt and Road corridors, near ports, near mineral deposits, near existing or prospective basing locations. Her question was whether the peacekeeping designation functions as cover for military and intelligence work in places where American interests are already thin.
Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania went after the money. Belt and Road recipients, he argued, drift toward Beijing in General Assembly voting once the loans clear, producing what he called a voting bloc bought and paid for over time.
Perry’s specific claim about aggregate voting patterns is contested among scholars who study it, and honest analysis should say so. But he does not need it. The harder evidence sits elsewhere. When Beijing crushed Hong Kong’s autonomy under the national security law in 2020, fifty-three countries signed a statement backing China at the Human Rights Council. Twenty-three signed the statement condemning it. That was not a coincidence of shared values. That was a ledger.
The Chronology That Ruins the Excuse
The predictable response arrived within hours. India’s Firstpost dismissed Waltz’s warning as hollow, arguing that China is simply filling a vacuum created by the Trump administration’s withdrawal from multilateral spending. America retreated, the reasoning goes, so Beijing advanced.
It is a tidy story with one problem. The dates refuse to cooperate.
Xi Jinping made his pledges to the U.N. in September 2015 — the 8,000-troop standby force, the billion dollars over ten years to a joint peace and development fund, the hundred million to the African Union. Barack Obama was president. American foreign aid was running near historic highs. The Belt and Road Initiative had launched two years before that, in 2013. And the high-water mark of Chinese control over U.N. specialized agencies, when Chinese nationals simultaneously ran the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, and the International Telecommunication Union’s industrial counterpart, came around 2019 and 2020. Every one of those victories was purchased while Washington was still writing the largest checks in the building.
We did not lose influence at the United Nations because we stopped paying. We lost it while paying, which is a considerably more embarrassing thing to explain.
What the Money Actually Bought
China is now assessed at 20 percent of the U.N. regular budget against America’s 22 percent, and sits second on peacekeeping assessments as well. It contributes more uniformed personnel than any other permanent Security Council member. Yet its actual deployed footprint has hovered around two thousand troops and police for years — modest, professional, well-equipped, and placed with unmistakable care.
Its largest single commitment by a wide margin has been South Sudan, where China holds substantial oil interests. Beijing sent an infantry battalion to guard a country whose crude it buys. One does not need a classified briefing to understand the arrangement.
Meanwhile the institution itself is shrinking. SIPRI counted 78,633 personnel across U.N. peace operations at the end of 2025, down roughly half from 2016 and the lowest figure since at least the turn of the century. The 17 percent single-year collapse was the sharpest of the decade. A smaller pool means each remaining deployment carries proportionally more weight, and Beijing has spent twenty years learning exactly which deployments are worth having.
The Confession Nobody Noticed
The committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Gregory Meeks, spent his opening statement flaying Waltz for American decline. Under this ambassadorship, he charged, China is now paying to keep the lights on at U.N. headquarters and has offered to host U.N. bodies in Beijing and Hong Kong.
Read that again, because Meeks handed the other side its entire argument while trying to score against it. He is not disputing that the United Nations follows the money. He is complaining that the money is now somebody else’s. Whatever else that is, it is not a defense of the institution’s independence. It is testimony against it.
Which brings us to the thing that should have been obvious in 1945. An organization funded by contributions and staffed by member-state militaries will always reflect whoever contributes most and staffs it best. Access to political and economic ground truth under humanitarian cover is not a bug in the peacekeeping model. It is a feature that every participating nation understands, and the People’s Liberation Army has proven a more attentive student than most, learning foreign operational practices at close range from soldiers we trained.
And thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.
Congress has spent this week discovering that the machine works precisely as designed. The uncomfortable part is remembering who designed it, who paid for it across seven decades, and who assumed that generosity would purchase permanent loyalty. Beijing never made that mistake. It bought specific things, in specific places, for specific reasons — and it is collecting.
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.
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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.
