(DCNF)—America’s political establishment has less respect for the U.S. dollar than our foreign adversaries.
That was made clear when Tucker Carlson recently interviewed the Russian strongman President Vladimir Putin, who clearly articulated how the uniparty in Washington is destroying America’s greatest strategic and economic asset — her currency.
Last year, led by the chairman and ranking member of the relevant House and Senate committees, a bipartisan and bicameral bill was introduced that would hand another $300 billion to the Ukraine, this time in the form of the confiscated U.S. dollars owned by the Russian central bank and the Russian people.
There are now renewed calls for this measure as both the budget battle at home and the war in the Ukraine drag on.
Not during the Vietnam or Korean wars or at any point during the height of the Cold War did America do this to the Soviet Union. U.S. statesmen understood then, as our adversaries do now, that the dollar’s reserve currency status is among our most important global assets, both economically and strategically.
This steadfast principled commitment facilitated our post-war expansion of influence over global affairs and commerce, directed investment to the U.S., and kept inflation at bay by parking dollars as reserves the world over.
Eager to demolish this foundation of our global presence and dam that holds back inflation, the Washington uniparty is rallying behind the next step to gut the U.S. dollar.
We warned on this site before how Biden’s unprecedented freezing of U.S. dollars owned by a foreign central bank has fundamentally jeopardized the currency’s hard-won reserve status. In fact, it’s a main factor now driving dozens of countries away from what they see as a dangerous and unpredictable United States — countries now including France and Saudi Arabia.
Of course, China is eager to exploit these fears and welcome countries into its rapidly growing BRICS anti-dollar bloc.
After the Biden administration spent months scoffing at the mere hint of de-dollarization, Janet Yellen dropped a bombshell last year, casually admitting that not only is de-dollarization happening, but Americans should expect more – in her words, it’s “only natural” for countries to flee the dollar since the world is big.
In fact, countries are not fleeing the dollar because the world is big, they are fleeing because Biden made them question the U.S. dollar by using it as a political football where countries must grovel and obey Washington or risk having their national patrimony frozen.
Nations who disagree with Biden on abortion, homosexuality, fossil fuel use, etc. also run the risk of seeing their dollar reserves taken away. As if on cue, the Biden administration has threatened sanctions against countries with anti-sodomy laws such as Uganda.
This asset seizure bill would dramatically up the ante. If the U.S. is willing to not just freeze, but actually hand over a nation’s entire dollar reserves to another country, it confirms the worst fears of any country questioning whether they can count on the dollar or the U.S. at all.
As more nations lose confidence in the dollar, they will sell their dollars. If enough countries do this, those trillions will come flooding home to America — essentially 70 years of deficits pouring in almost all at once.
This tsunami could set off an inflation the likes of which we haven’t seen in a century. Imagine the last three years of price increases put on steroids, amphetamines and covered in nicotine patches.
At a minimum, it’d be multiple years of double-digit inflation like we’re used to seeing in third world countries. At worst, it’d be a full-blown Weimar Republic replacing wallets with wheelbarrows for carrying around currency.
Such an economic catastrophe would, of course, take America off the world stage, not by choice but by necessity. The uniparty would have made their virtue-signaling gift to the Ukraine at the expense of America’s very standing as a world power.
The naïve calls for currency manipulation are a defiling of the dollar’s sanctity and an assault on people’s property rights. If the uniparty in Congress and the Biden administration push the issue much further, it will mean a long walk off a short pier into an ocean of misery for the American people.
E.J. Antoni is a public finance economist, and Peter St. Onge is the Mark A. Kolokotrones fellow in economic freedom, at The Heritage Foundation.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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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.
