(Zero Hedge)—One of our emerging investment themes (beyond nuclear, AI, and “Powering Up America“) is the accelerating US-China decoupling, with a particular focus on companies with robust ex-China supply chains as Beijing increasingly weaponizes exports of strategic materials, including tungsten and germanium.
At the same time, the Trump administration’s expanding sanctions campaign against Chinese entities linked to Iran is adding another friction point to an already deteriorating bilateral relationship. Looking toward 2027, one of the biggest geopolitical tail risks could be a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, which would severely disrupt global trade, semiconductor production, and critical supply chains.
The latest report from Taiwan’s main English-language daily newspaper, the Taipei Times, shows that China deployed a record 244 coast guard, research, and other government vessels around the island.
The surge in Chinese vessels surrounding Taiwan, in what may be a mock blockade run, exceeded June’s total of 55 vessels and averaged nearly 8 ships per day. Another 152 were detected during the first three weeks of August.
About 60% of the ships were Chinese coast guard ships, while research and other government vessels accounted for the rest. The figures exclude the People’s Liberation Army Navy warships operating around Taiwan almost daily.
“When we say the situation is becoming increasingly severe, we mean that the number of their government vessels in the waters surrounding Taiwan has increased, and there was a marked increase in July,” a senior Coast Guard Administration official told the local outlet.
The outlet said the Chinese vessels were likely involved in “oceanographic sampling and seabed survey operations,” which could contribute to China’s “anti-submarine warfare databases.”
Ryan Martinson, an expert on China’s maritime strategy at the US Naval War College, told the outlet that “any kind of data/knowledge is highly useful for Chinese naval forces, which will operate in these waters in the event of a conflict.”
In the past couple of months, Martinson said he had observed a “very large increase” in the number of Chinese research ships operating around Taiwan, especially to the east of Taiwan proper.
“This is not a new ‘play’ in its ‘playbook.’ Rather, the novel aspect is that the scale of these operations around Taiwan is unprecedented,” he said.
Overnight news:
What is becoming evident is that China may not even have to fire a shot to isolate Taiwan. However, we do not expect a future quarantine or blockade before Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with President Trump in Washington on September 24.
After the Trump-Xi summit, however, China hawks on Capitol Hill could get their way, as a new Politico report says lawmakers are pressing the Treasury Department to target Chinese banks over Iran.
“Any country complicit in providing an economic lifeline to Iran’s terrorist regime, including China, must be held accountable,” said Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), a member of the House Select Committee on China.
LaHood noted that sanctions on Chinese banks that do business with Iran would send “a clear message to China and every other nation that enabling Tehran’s malign actions will come at a cost.”
Taken together, the surge in Chinese government vessels around Taiwan appears less like routine maritime activity and more like preparation for a future quarantine or blockade.
For markets, any move toward a blockade would accelerate US-China decoupling and trigger severe disruptions across semiconductors, shipping, energy, and critical-material supply chains.
Decoupling Theme:
- China’s Tungsten Chokehold Turns Almonty Into a Critical-Metal Lifeline
- “BlackDiamonds Are Forever”: How To Profit From The China-Driven Germanium Squeeze
We’re already mapping out critical material supply chains outside China to help readers be well prepared for what seems to be an incoming crisis.
Notably, a blockade or quarantine could be imposed at virtually any time of year and is not weather-dependent. However, a full-scale Chinese invasion has two favorable windows:
- Spring: roughly March through May, with April often cited as the best month
- Autumn: roughly late September through November, with October often cited as the best month
Beijing does not need favorable invasion weather to begin isolating Taiwan. The record number of ships around Taiwan may only suggest that much more is to come.
This also comes as President Trump has declared the Strait of Hormuz a “New U.S. Territory,” complicating matters for China because about 45% to 50% of the country’s crude oil imports normally transit the critical waterway.
The US has also struck the “biggest oil deal in history” by taking a majority stake in Venezuela’s oil industry, cutting into yet another source of cheap crude for China.
Taken together, China might feel more pressure than ever to blockade Taiwan, particularly given that the U.S. military is experiencing a “beyond critical” shortage of missile interceptors and other critical weapons.
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.
