Treasury secretary Scott Bessent gave an interview during the G20 gathering in Asheville, North Carolina, in which he calmly diagnosed Canada’s self-inflicted problems: “We’ve had a ‘free rider’ problem with Canada,” he observed.
“Canada had a great military. They were right there at the forefront on the beaches of D-Day, and what the Canadian government has done to the Canadian Armed Forces, if you look at the ranks of NATO spending, they are near the very bottom, like they’re cellar dwellers around with Spain in terms of their military spending to GDP.” Instead of investing in its military and national security, Canada spent that money on “global warming” fantasies and welfare goodies while taking advantage of America’s “free” security services.
In economics, free-rider problems arise when people benefit from shared resources without fairly paying for them. In the context of military security, almost every member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been free-riding on the United States for decades. Even though treaty obligations require each nation to pay its fair share for the common defense of the military alliance, Canada and European countries have depended upon American taxpayers to shoulder the burden of providing security for most of the West.
Recently, some members have touted imaginary “increases” in defense spending by relabeling non-military projects as “military” expenditures. Canada’s Mark Carney, for instance, has created an investment bank that uses taxpayer dollars to fund Ukrainian reconstruction projects and “climate change” initiatives. Although the central-banker-turned-prime-
The United States has allowed this free-rider problem to persist for many reasons. NATO was birthed in the wake of WWII and the start of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. As such, maintaining peace in Europe and providing effective deterrence to Soviet expansion were paramount goals. European economies and infrastructure lay in ruins.
The U.S. emerged from WWII as both a military and economic superpower. Transitioning from a nation state into a veritable empire with global reach, the U.S. accepted that its unparalleled powers came with unparalleled responsibilities.
Nevertheless, seventy-seven years after NATO’s formation, the military alliance’s free-rider problem has distorted reality in significant ways. First, member nations pocketed the “savings” derived from having the U.S. ensure their security and redirected government spending away from their own militaries and toward ever-growing social welfare programs.
Second, even though the U.S. provides the bulk of NATO defenses, alliance members conduct their affairs on the world stage as if they possess substantially more military resources than they would otherwise have at their disposal absent assurances from the United States.
The first departure from reality has prompted Canada, the United Kingdom, and much of the European Union to embrace forms of socialism that are antithetical to personal property rights, individual liberty, and free markets. While heavily regulating their economies and stifling economic growth with “green energy” mandates that drive out businesses and increase the cost of consumer goods, beneficiaries of NATO’s security welfare have reallocated their defense budgets toward “free” services for their own welfare states.
Without the U.S. military defending their sovereignties, Canada, the U.K., and the E.U. would not have had the money for public healthcare, housing, transportation, food, and other generous handouts.
In other words, U.S. taxpayers have been subsidizing socialism throughout the West that would have been prohibitively expensive had NATO’s members been forced to defend themselves. Likewise, Canada and Europe would not have been able to waste so much money on “global warming” delusions or “green energy” money-laundering projects had they been forced to govern responsibly.
Lastly, these NATO members would not have become magnets for tens of millions of foreign invaders had Western governments directed their budgets toward securing national borders, rather than providing “free” stuff for every illegal immigrant.
Absent American security guarantees created through NATO, the true costs of socialism would have been laid bare: Heavily regulated nations hostile toward property rights and entrepreneurial freedom would not have been able to pursue unsustainable welfare programs or economically suicidal “climate change” fantasies.
The second departure from reality is perhaps even more dangerous. For many decades, NATO members followed the lead of the United States. That made sense because NATO is an empty threat without American military assets and personnel.
Right now member nations are bucking the U.S. They have refused to assist American operations in the Strait of Hormuz, as President Trump and the U.S. military work to eliminate Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the “terror premium” it extracts from oil shipments. Simultaneously, NATO members have become increasingly belligerent toward the Russian Federation.
As the European Union’s economically suicidal “green energy” policies have made it dependent upon oil and natural gas from Russia, the Middle East, and the United States, the choice to appease Iran while provoking Russia increases the likelihood of Europe’s economic collapse.
For his part, President Trump has been clear that the United States and the Russian Federation should do everything possible to limit direct confrontation. Trump views the war in Ukraine as a stupid and unnecessary conflict that never would have occurred under his watch. But for NATO’s continued eastward advance right up to Russia’s borders and the European and American-instigated 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine, this war would not be raging today.
Since his return to office in 2025, the president has worked to end the killing and destruction. Rather than follow Trump’s lead, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Commission have continued to pledge military support for Ukraine despite the fact that Ukraine is neither a member of NATO nor part of the European Union.
It is highly unlikely that Canada and Europe’s NATO members would be expanding the war today if they did not have Uncle Sam’s NATO commitments in place.
WWII began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In another example of how history might not repeat but often rhymes, September 1, 2026, is the day that Germany accused Russia of committing an act of war.
A small quadcopter drone carrying an improvised explosive was found near Ukrainian cargo planes at the Leipzig-Halle Airport on August 4. After a month-long investigation, German authorities have pinned the “drone attack” on low-level Russian agents. Germany raised its threat level assessment to “high” and kicked Russian diplomats out of the country.
A prominent German defense executive says, “Germany and Russia are at war.” Russia called the allegation “nonsensical” and “far-fetched” and compared it to European leaders’ false 2022 accusation that Russia had blown up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, an act of sabotage that appears to have been the work of Ukraine.
Nevertheless, NATO members rushed to declare their willingness to fight Russia. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk assured NATO’s support for Ukraine against Russia. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote, “[T]he EU stands in full solidarity with Germany in the face of this attack by Russia.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte followed suit, all accusing Russia of a “hybrid attack” against a NATO member country. In Brussels, European leaders are assembling a war cabinet.
At the same time, Ukraine’s holdover-president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, threatened the safety of civilian airliners flying through Russian airspace. Russian President Vladimir Putin called Zelenskyy’s threat “a move toward state terrorism” that would necessitate “a response.”
Canada and Europe’s NATO members want more war. Non-NATO Ukraine wants more war. The United States should get out of the way. Let the free-riders fight WWIII.
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.
