Kingdom Report

www.kingdomvision.co.za

Week of 11 September 2026

 

Converging Global Crises

Here a quick overview of  crises now emerging in September 2026. The world is in transition. This will have great implications for the future of the Church in South Africa, our calling in Southern Africa and our prophetic relationship with Israel. And a couple of strange photos from 11 September 2001. Things are not always what they appear to be....

 

As this is the 25th anniversary of the great 9-11 attack on America on 11 September 2011 I thought I would remind you that things are not always what they seem. On this date my wife and family were living outside Washington DC where I had opened an office to promote exports from South Africa to America.  As it happened we found the best product we could export from South Africa was farm workers from South Africa to the American Custom Harvesters. We were the ones who started the great H2A program used by thousands of South Africans to work in America.

I watched the TV broadcasts with horror of the attack on America. As we lived outside Washington DC my wife and i decided to go the next day past the great Pentagon building to see the enormous Boeing 757 jet crash in the Pentagon building.  We slowly passed the Pentagon building along with hundreds of other curious onlookers to see the great crash first hand. I expected to see a crashed jet, tail and wing debris scattered, ambulances picking up dead bodies etc.  I saw nothing of the kind.

 

 

This was the hole made immediately after the Pentagon hit before the side collapsed. Looked to me like they were hit by a missile. Definitely not a Boeing 757 which was nowhere to be found..

 

 

As I say, on this 25th anniversary of a great tragedy...the world is entering a great world collapse tragedy. Don't believe everything you hear as to why, how and whom. Analyze from the prophetic times we live in. I will analyze the crises in relation to South Africa, the Church and Israel in my summary.

As of September 2026, the international system is under simultaneous pressure in nine domains. Russia’s campaign against Ukraine has shifted from territorial nibbling toward a strategy of rendering the Ukrainian state administratively and economically non-viable through energy destruction, demographic exhaustion, and financial attrition ahead of a severe winter. The United States–Israel war with Iran, now in its seventh month, has not produced a clean American victory. Iran retains the capacity to choke Gulf shipping, strike tankers and regional energy assets, and impose costs that Washington cannot easily translate into a decisive political outcome. That stalemate is itself a strategic result: it advertises the limits of American power at the world’s most important energy chokepoint.

Long-dated U.S. Treasury yields have moved into a range that makes the existing federal debt stock expensive to roll. European manufacturing competitiveness is being eroded by energy costs, welfare commitments, and rising debt-service ratios. Fertilizer, diesel, and Black Sea grain disruptions, layered on a strengthening El Niño, point to a food-security crisis that will be felt most sharply in 2027. Capital expenditure on AI data centres has reached a scale that markets now treat as a leveraged bet on future cash flow that may not arrive at the required speed, while Chinese hyperscalers compete on cheaper power. Oil-product shortages, not only crude headlines, threaten a transport-cost inflation shock. Reserve managers and trade blocs continue to diversify away from exclusive dollar-SWIFT dependence. Drone and missile saturation has rewritten the cost of defending ships, jets, and massed formations.

None of these crises is self-contained. The policy implication is not that every worst-case path is already locked in. It is that the system’s shock absorbers — spare oil, cheap long-term money, Western ammunition stocks, food buffers, and unchallenged dollar centrality — are all thinner than they were in 2021.

Table 1. Crisis snapshot — September 2026

Theatre	Present condition	Near-term risk
1. Russia–Ukraine	Attritional Russian pressure; Ukrainian state capacity degrading	Winter energy collapse; further territorial and fiscal loss
2. Iran–United States	Seven-month war; Hormuz throttled; no decisive U.S. win	Strategic setback for U.S. Gulf position
3. Bond / debt	20-year ~5.4%; 30-year ~5.4%; rising term premium	U.S. fiscal squeeze on roll-over and interest
4. European Union	High energy + high debt + welfare load	Loss of manufacturing edge; bond stress
5. Food 2027	Fertilizer, diesel, Black Sea, El Niño stacked	Famine risk in import-dependent states
6. AI capex	Trillions in data-centre build vs uncertain revenue	Equity crash if cash flow disappoints
7. Oil / products	Hormuz disruption; product and diesel tightness	Transport inflation; recession risk
8. Reserve currency	Slow diversification to gold, yuan, non-SWIFT rails	Weaker dollar privilege; euro exposed
9. Drone warfare	Cheap massed drones beat expensive platforms	Small actors can close chokepoints

 

The war is in its fifth year of full-scale fighting. The operational picture in September 2026 is not a clean map of collapsing Ukrainian lines in every sector. Ukrainian forces still conduct deep drone and missile raids — including strikes on Russian energy and logistics sites thousands of kilometres from the front — and have at times recovered ground. That fact does not cancel the strategic trend this desk assesses as decisive: Russia has chosen to destroy Ukraine as a functioning nation-state rather than merely to freeze a line of contact.

That choice is visible in three instruments. First, the systematic bombardment of power plants, substations, gas infrastructure, and urban heating. Second, the grinding of manpower and mobilisation capacity until the Ukrainian state cannot staff the army, the civil service, and the winter utility system at the same time. Third, the financial siege: aid uncertainty in Western capitals, a war-shattered tax base, and a currency and budget that cannot independently fund reconstruction or even routine energy imports.

Winter 2026–27 as a weapon

A severe winter is approaching with Ukraine’s energy system already degraded. Intermittent grid collapse is not only a humanitarian problem. It is a governance problem. Hospitals, water pumping, rail signalling, munitions plants, and digital administration all depend on electrons. When those fail in rotation through January and February, the state does not merely suffer discomfort; it loses the ability to present itself as a continuous public authority. That is the point of the Russian design.

Western diplomatic missions and peace envoys have come and gone. Russian air attacks resume when talks pause. Moscow’s political message is consistent: time favours the larger industrial and demographic reservoir. For Ukraine, the combination of energy poverty, refugee and casualty losses, and fiscal dependence is the pathway to a hollowed state even where flags still fly over city halls.

Assessment: Russia is not required to occupy every oblast in order to win in the sense that matters to the Kremlin — the reduction of Ukraine to a non-sovereign, non-viable buffer. Ukraine is losing that contest. The winter of 2026–27 is the next test of whether Kyiv remains a going concern as a nation rather than a wartime administration on life support.

The United States and Israel opened major military operations against Iran in late February 2026. The campaign was conceived as a short, punishing war. Seven months later it is a costly stalemate with dangerous consequences for America’s position in world affairs. Washington can point to tactical successes: pressure on Iranian oil exports, periodic escort of tankers, strikes on IRGC assets and Iranian tankers. Those are not the same thing as control of the Gulf.

Iran closed or severely restricted the Strait of Hormuz at the outset and has repeatedly demonstrated that it can drive transit volumes down — at points toward the low millions of barrels per day against a peacetime corridor that carried roughly a fifth of seaborne oil and a large share of LNG. In early September, both sides struck shipping in the largest wave of attacks since the war began. Brent moved back above $100 a barrel. Iran has threatened Gulf energy infrastructure, including American-linked assets, and has used drones, mines, missiles, and proxies to make the waterway a zone of rationed risk rather than a U.S.-guaranteed commons.

Why this is a strategic setback for Washington

A superpower that must keep a heavy naval concentration on station merely to move a fraction of normal Gulf volumes is a superpower that has lost cheap command of the commons. Allies in Europe and Asia experience the war as an inflation and recession shock, not as a demonstration of American competence. Gulf producers discover that U.S. security guarantees do not keep the strait open on demand. China, as the principal residual buyer of sanctioned or distressed barrels and as a political alternative, gains relative standing even when its own supply is disrupted.

Iran does not need to sink the Fifth Fleet to emerge as the rising power of the Gulf system. It needs to prove that no tanker moves without regard to Tehran’s red lines. That proof is already partly in the market. The longer the war lasts without a settlement that restores uncontested transit under Western rules, the more the regional order tilts toward an Iranian veto over Gulf energy. That is a strategic defeat for the United States, whether or not official Washington uses the word.

As of 11 September 2026, the U.S. 20-year Treasury yield stands near 5.42 percent and the 30-year near 5.37 percent, with the 10-year close to 4.95 percent. These are not the double-digit long rates of the early 1980s. They are high relative to the post-2008 and post-2020 era in which governments learned to treat near-zero money as a permanent endowment. For a federal debt stock measured in the tens of trillions, the difference between 2 percent and 5-plus percent on the long end is the difference between a manageable coupon and a fiscal crisis of roll-over.

The arithmetic is simple and ugly. A large share of U.S. debt issued in the cheap-money years must be refinanced at the new term structure. Net interest then crowds out defence, energy security, and social outlays — or forces still more issuance, which lifts yields again. Markets are no longer pricing Treasuries as a risk-free asset in the old sense; they are pricing duration risk, inflation risk from energy wars, and political risk around deficits that neither party has shown a will to close.

The same term-premium shock is visible across advanced issuers. When the reserve-currency sovereign pays more than 5 percent for twenty- and thirty-year money, every other borrower — emerging-market states, highly indebted European governments, leveraged corporations, and data-centre special-purpose vehicles — pays a spread on top. That is how a U.S. fiscal problem becomes a world debt crisis. America can still print the unit in which the debt is denominated. What it cannot do, at these rates, is pretend that future debt service is a rounding error.

Europe’s post-2022 energy break with cheap Russian pipeline gas was never fully repaired. The Iran war has now superimposed a second energy shock: higher seaborne oil and product prices, LNG tightness, and diesel costs that feed directly into factory gate prices and farm operations. German, Italian, and Central European manufacturers that already struggled against U.S. and Chinese unit costs are being priced out of tradable goods. Energy is not a side bill. It is the competitiveness of the industrial core.

Debt, bonds, and the welfare state

High bond yields collide with political systems built on expensive social protection, ageing populations, and wartime-adjacent spending on Ukraine, energy subsidies, and rearmament. Tax receipts do not rise automatically with yields. They stagnate when industry loses orders. The resulting gap is filled by more issuance, which the market finances only at still higher rates. Several EU sovereigns are not facing a textbook emerging-market sudden stop. They are facing a slow financial constriction in which welfare promises, energy costs, and debt service cannot be honoured together at the old standard of living.

Assessment: Europe is not on the brink of a single-weekend collapse of the euro. It is facing a multi-year loss of manufacturing position and a fiscal architecture that no longer adds up. That is a form of financial unravelling — slower than a classic sovereign default, more corrosive than a recession that ends in four quarters.

Food crises are assembled from inputs, logistics, and weather. All three are deteriorating at once. Gulf-origin phosphate and nitrogen movements have been disrupted by the Iran war and the restriction of Hormuz. Russia remains a central supplier of nitrogen fertilizers and other nutrients; war risk, export policy, and sanctions friction have made that supply less reliable and more expensive. Diesel — the fuel of tractors, combines, trucks, and barges — has tightened with refined-product markets. Farmers in import-dependent regions will apply less nutrient and run less machinery. Yields fall with a lag. That lag is why 2027, not only the present harvest, is the danger year.

On the logistics side, Black Sea grain corridors from Ukraine and Russia have again been squeezed by strikes on ports, terminals, and shipping. The combined interruption is assessed here in the order of tens of millions of tonnes — the briefing assumption of some 50 million metric tonnes of grains withheld or delayed is the planning figure this desk uses for stress tests. Even if some cargo still moves under higher insurance and longer routes, the effective surplus available to North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa shrinks.

El Niño is present and is forecast to persist into early 2027, with a material probability of a strong event at the November 2026–January 2027 peak. Historical analogues point to drought risk in Southern Africa, parts of India and Australia, and Central America, with mixed effects elsewhere. Stacked on fertilizer scarcity and high diesel, the weather shock does not need to be universal to produce famine conditions in states that already spend a large share of household income on bread and maize. 2027 is the year those three constraints land on the same plate.

The build-out of AI data centres has become one of the largest capital programmes in peacetime industrial history. Utilities, chipmakers, cloud platforms, and real-estate vehicles have committed sums that, in aggregate, run into the trillions when power generation, grids, land, cooling, and specialised chips are counted together. The bull case is that inference and enterprise software will throw off cash flows large enough to service that capital. The bear case, which this desk now treats as the base risk, is that revenue arrives too slowly, at too low a margin, or is competed away.

Two features make the structure bubble-like. First, much of the spend is debt- or lease-financed against assumed utilisation. If model products do not generate the implied subscription and token revenue, the assets are specialised sheds full of rapidly depreciating silicon. Second, China is fielding its own hyperscale stack with structurally cheaper industrial electricity in several provinces and a willingness to price AI services as a strategic export rather than as a high-margin Western software product. Cheaper Chinese inference undercuts the return assumptions of American and European projects that paid scarcity prices for power and chips.

A disorderly repricing would not stay inside technology indices. Pension funds, private credit, and regional banks are exposed through utilities, municipal power deals, and vendor financing. An AI capex bust layered on high long-term rates and an energy shock is a plausible trigger for a broad equity and credit crash.

The Iran war is an oil-product crisis as much as a crude-headline crisis. Flows through Hormuz have swung violently — from near-closure toward partial recovery under U.S. escort, then back down when fighting resumed in late August and early September. Independent estimates have put strait transit at times as low as about 2 million barrels per day against a pre-war seaborne Gulf volume an order of magnitude larger. Alternative routes and inventories cushion the first weeks. They do not replace a missing 10 million barrels of the right molecules in the right places for month after month.

Refining is the hidden fracture. When tankers are hit, when Gulf and adjacent plants run at reduced rates, and when some facilities are damaged or idled, the shortage appears first as diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline, not as a neat global crude balance. Diesel scarcity is a tax on every supply chain: food, construction, mining, and retail distribution. Oil wells and associated infrastructure that cannot be pumped, maintained, or staffed in a war zone do not restart on a press release. Restoration takes years, not weeks.

The shortage range of 10–20 million barrels per day of effective, quality-adjusted supply to the open market is a stress interval, not a single published official statistic. Even the lower half of that interval, if sustained, is enough to drive a global recession and, if policy tightens into the inflation, a depression-like collapse in trade volumes. Transport-cost inflation will not wait for the recession to be declared.

Reserve-currency status is a habit enforced by law, markets, and fear. It erodes when counterparties decide that dollar assets and the SWIFT-centred payment system are political weapons they cannot afford to depend on exclusively. The Iran war, secondary sanctions, the weaponization of reserves after 2022, and the fiscal arithmetic of U.S. debt have all taught the same lesson to surplus states in Asia, the Gulf, and the Global South: hold fewer exclusive dollar claims, settle more trade in other units, and keep gold as the asset that no foreign court can freeze.

The yuan will not replace the dollar as the world’s dominant reserve in 2026 or 2027. That is not the relevant test. The relevant test is whether a growing share of oil, metals, and intra-Asian trade can clear outside SWIFT, in yuan, dirhams, rupees, or bilateral netting, with gold in the background as settlement insurance. That shift is already visible in fragments. Each fragment reduces the automatic bid for Treasuries that once allowed Washington to run large deficits at repressed yields.

The euro is not the beneficiary. Europe’s energy and fiscal weakness make the euro a co-sufferer, not an alternative hegemon. A crisis of the dollar’s exclusivity is therefore a crisis of the entire Western monetary pair. The danger for America is not overnight demonetisation. It is a higher permanent risk premium on federal debt at the same moment that interest costs are already the binding fiscal constraint.

A new kind of war is no longer emerging. It has arrived. Mass-produced drones, loitering munitions, and relatively cheap anti-ship and anti-air missiles allow a secondary military power — or a proxy — to impose unacceptable risk on destroyers, jets on the ground, tank columns, and logistics hubs. Iran’s campaign around Hormuz and the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea are the demonstration cases. A small inventory of expensive Western ships cannot stay on station forever against a renewable inventory of cheap attackers.

The strategic consequence is the democratisation of area denial. Control of a strait or a sea lane no longer requires a blue-water navy. It requires sensors, cheap airframes, mines, and a political willingness to keep firing after the first week of retaliation. That is how a state that cannot win a classic force-on-force war against the United States can still defeat the American mission that matters: keeping oil moving. The same logic now governs land war in Ukraine, where attrition of armour and artillery is increasingly a function of first-person-view drones rather than of matching tank fleets.

Doctrine, procurement, and alliance planning that still treat the carrier strike group or the heavy brigade as the unit of decision are behind the cost curve. Until Western inventories of interceptors and cheap attritable systems catch up, small powers will continue to punch above their weight at the world’s chokepoints.

South Africa, the Church.....Israel

We are facing international crises that will create a new world order.  I maintain that South Africa is one of the best places on planet earth to survive and thrive into this new world order. But we as a Church need to be involved. In policy formulation, in activist forums.  We have stake in the world to come as God's plan is for the meek to inherit the earth...our earth!

In South Africa we need a change of government.  A return to a non-racial society, a return to security of property, a rebuilding of infrastructure, devolving power out of Pretoria and back to provinces and local government, a professional civil service non-political and professionally qualified, a reform of police and security services. And many more policy changes and applications.

As a Church we are also citizens. We need to be involved. We need to have discussions and conferences on church and state, on policies that affect our families and the poor. On an economic system that prioritizes a different way to measure GDP and what constituters true growth.

The coming election....

My prediction and call of action:  There is a law in our constitution that says a majority of our 400 member MP's can vote to dissolve Parliament after 3 years from the previous general election. (section 50) And then in 90 days a new general election must be held. On 29th May 2027 it will be 3 years since the last general election. 90 days after that date on 1 September 2027 we can have a new general election.

If the ANC loses as bad as the polls indicate in the November municipal election then I predict there will be enough opposition party MP's to make a 201 - 199 vote on 29 May 2027 to dissolve parliament and call for new elections on 1 September 2027. We don't need to wait for 5 year for the President to announce new elections.  We need a new government and new policies in 2027.  The world is changing and changing fast.  We need to transition South Africa purposefully and with new policies and a new government...and with lots more comitted Christian MP's.

About Israel.....

There are nations that will not survive the coming transition and the emerging international crises.  I wish no nation harm or ill-will. Certainly not Israel. However Israel will not survive economically, socially and militarily. For the same reson that apartheid South Africa could not survive over time.  Too many pressures, international and local.

 I will no go into lengthy analysis in this blog. I will say one of the major transitions the Church will have to make is what a scriptural eschatology looks like with no national state of Israel in Palestine.  It will be a shock to many.  It will mean time to get out of "end times" dead dead end and start serioulsy planning for the long term future of our nation, our families and our Church.