Rextor - Statistics (Joke)

  Who said, "There are lies, damned lies and statistics!" ?

  And sure enough, statistics these days are used and abused by governments and companies, to find growth where there is none, patterns to confirm prejudices, tendencies which can be inverted just by changing the scaling, When you hear a government official speaking of "science", you can be certain that souped up statistics will follow in short order, concocted by well paid "scientists" which gift aligns more with number wizardry than "real" calculations. What is real anyway when the answer is announced on TV first, to be confirmed later?

 

The Japan Shock: How the World’s Biggest Creditor Could Cripple US Markets

   Japan has been the canary in the "debt" coal mine of Western countries for the last 30 years. And the canary is now dying. The mix of abysmal population decrease, debt explosion, Yen value crash and lower productivity is about to explode mightily. And when it does, so will the rest of the financial markets around the world.

  In less than 20 years, the Yen has lost about half its value with interest rates close to zero over the period, feeding the famous Yen carry trade. This cannot last otherwise the Yen would lose another 50% of its value in the coming 2 to 3 years but at the same time it cannot stop either. Japan is stuck. 

  These unstable conditions can last a few months but eventually, the Yen will go critical and the market will explode. Either demanding an immediate rise of interest rates that Japan cannot afford or a sharp decline of the value of the money that the Japanese cannot afford, less they become poorer than the Philippines which at the very least can feed itself. Japan cannot. Something is about to happen...  

Guest Post by Lau Vegys

What if I told you that something bad is happening with the U.S. government’s biggest creditor on Earth—and it could have very serious implications for your portfolio?

This story caught my eye a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to write about it but kept pushing it to the backburner because I had my plate full at the time. But it’s too important to ignore any longer.

So what’s going on?

Last month, Japan’s Cabinet Office published their latest economic figures, and they were not good. Japan’s economy shrank for the first time in a year, contracting by 0.7%.

That’s bad news, especially since it happened even before the bulk of President Trump’s tariff measures took effect. Now it’s almost a given that Japan will continue shrinking this quarter, which would put the country in a technical recession.

I realize you probably don’t spend much time thinking about Japan’s economy. Most people don’t. It’s on the other side of the world and doesn’t dominate headlines like the U.S. or China.

But Japan isn’t just any country. It’s one of the biggest creditors on Earth.

Japan holds over $3 trillion in net foreign assets and is the top holder of U.S. Treasuries—over $1 trillion as of 2025. Take a look at the graph below.

And it’s not just bonds. Japanese institutions have billions tied up in U.S. stocks, corporate debt, and real estate.

But what happens if Japan suddenly needs to call that money home?

It would send shockwaves through global markets—driving up interest rates and making borrowing far more expensive for everyone. And because Japan has its fingers in so many pies, it wouldn’t just rattle Wall Street… it could light the fuse for the next global recession.

Japan’s Many Problems

To understand why Japan can actually crash global markets, you need to understand the precarious situation the country is in. And it goes well beyond one quarter of negative growth.

Japan is facing a deepening population crisis. The nation’s population has declined for 15 consecutive years as fewer people marry and have children.

That’s not unusual—many developed countries are grappling with falling birth rates.

But not every developed country has the third-lowest fertility rate in the world. Japan recently hit a record low of 1.15, down from 1.2 the year before—the lowest since record-keeping began in 1947.

Keep in mind, you need a fertility rate of about 2.1 to maintain a stable population.

To make matters worse, Japan also happens to be the oldest country in the world. About 30% of its population is over the age of 65.

Combined, these factors mean that by 2050, Japan is projected to lose around 20 million people—about 16% of its current population. And by the end of the century, the country is expected to lose more than half its population. That’s like the entire state of Florida vanishing now, and most of the United States East Coast disappearing later.

This crisis affects far more than retirement homes and hospitals—it’s crushing the entire economy.

Fewer workers means less growth. More retirees means rising government spending. Every below-replacement-level country faces these problems, but when your fertility rate is plummeting toward 1 and you have the oldest population on Earth, you’re dealing with a whole new level of crisis.

The government’s solution to keep the system afloat?

Borrow money. Lots of it.

For decades, Japan has borrowed like there’s no tomorrow, which is why it now has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the developed world: over 260% and rising.

It was the same familiar playbook: keep interest rates at zero and have the central bank print money to buy government debt.

And for years, Japan got away with it.

Then reality came knocking.

When Math No Longer Works

You might remember Monday, August 5th, 2024. Calling it a bad day in the markets doesn’t even begin to cover it. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei index plunged 12.40%—its worst single-day drop since Black Monday in 1987.

The sell-off started in Japan but quickly spread across Asia, then Europe, and finally the U.S. All told, over $5 trillion in global market value was wiped out in just one day.

And it wasn’t just stocks. Oil, other commodities, Bitcoin—you name it—everything got hit.

But more striking than the losses was the speed. Things unraveled so fast that even seasoned market pros were caught off guard.

The trigger behind the global meltdown was a financial powder keg known as the yen carry trade.

Here’s how it works…

In a yen carry trade, big institutions borrow Japanese yen at rock-bottom interest rates. Then they convert that cheap money into dollars and plow it into higher-yielding assets abroad, especially in the U.S.

Imagine you’re a trader who borrows 10 million yen when the exchange rate is 100 yen to the dollar. That gives you $100,000 to play with. You dump this money into U.S. Treasury bonds yielding 4%. After a year, you’ve pocketed $4,000 in interest. And it gets even better—if the yen has weakened to 105 yen per dollar, you only need $95,238 to repay your loan. You’ve profited not just from the interest rate difference, but also from the currency move.

It’s essentially free money. At its peak, Bloomberg estimated yen carry trades reached hundreds of billions globally. Traders had been milking this cash cow for decades. Some people called it “the global money glitch.”

But there’s a (predictable) catch.

This strategy only works as long as Japanese interest rates stay low and the yen remains weak.

If either goes the wrong way, the trade breaks.

That’s exactly what happened in 2024. After nearly two decades of keeping rates near zero, the Bank of Japan finally blinked—raising rates from negative territory to 0.25%. That alone sent the yen surging 10% in a matter of weeks.

Suddenly, the math flipped. Traders now needed more dollars to repay their yen-denominated loans than they had borrowed. That triggered a violent unwinding of positions—and a cascading sell-off across global assets.

The rest is history.

Just a Preview

Now, the Bank of Japan didn’t raise rates out of the goodness of its heart. When you have $8.5 trillion in debt—over 260% of GDP—even tiny rate increases are brutally expensive.

They were forced to.

Bond investors had started demanding higher yields. Japan’s auctions had begun failing. The BoJ, already holding 50% of the government bond market, found itself buying alone. Foreign and domestic investors were either fleeing or demanding much higher rates to offset inflation and currency risk.

So the BoJ capitulated.

And with Japan’s problems in 2025 looking worse than in 2024, rates will probably keep climbing—whether they like it or not.

The alternative is even more trouble selling their debt—along with a yen free fall that would make imports ruinously expensive. And I do mean ruinously since Japan imports 60% of its food and nearly all of its fossil fuel energy.

But rising rates in Japan spell trouble for the U.S.

Remember, Japan holds over $1 trillion in U.S. Treasuries—more than any other country. As Japanese rates rise and the yen strengthens, parking money abroad gets a lot less attractive. Instead of financing America’s debt binge, that capital will stay home.

Japan’s finance minister recently even floated the idea that their U.S. Treasury holdings could be “leverage” in trade talks. He later backtracked—but the message was clear: nothing is off the table in hard times.

Losing America’s biggest creditor would crush America’s global credit standing, hammer the dollar, and drive up borrowing costs across the board. That would translate into higher interest rates for consumers, a paralyzed economy, and a brutal market collapse.

When August 5th, 2024 hit, I was struck by how violently U.S. markets reacted to events in Japan. The speed and scale of the sell-off were unprecedented outside of the COVID crash in March 2020.

I now strongly believe that was just a preview.

U.N. Quietly Lowers Population Forecasts

   Our problem is not really too many people, but too many people living out of balance with nature. This said, a "natural balance" can be especially harsh and painful, so it is up to us to create optimal conditions.

   The other important factor to consider is that economists since Malthus have been consistently wrong in their predictions, not really about the growth of population which tend to be rather stable and predictable but about how our societies can cope with this rise. 

  If you travel around the world, you will quickly realize how overcrowded and amazingly empty, our planet is, both at the same time. Russia is empty, almost forever, and so is Australia. But both the cold and lack of water almost guaranty that this will remain so for a long time. Conversely, places where conditions are optimum are now badly overcrowded. The Mediterranean and Florida coasts are almost a wall of concrete. And some developing cities are metastasizing more than they are growing.    

  So whatever the global statistics say, we are heading for trouble. The trouble may not be as bad as could be if we look, for example, at the precipitous decline of fertility in countries like Bangladesh. On the other hand, it is almost certain that wars for water, food and resources will explode in the very near future. 

  We would need two Niles to feed both Ethiopia and Egypt. Pakistan and South East Asia will also face problems sooner than later. Climate change or not, we will be facing a "dry" year at some stage, and it would have been much easier to face such a challenge with 3 billion people than with 9. The real risk in the end is that what we cannot do on our own, nature will do for us the hard way, as it has always done in the past.

Authored by Bill King via RealClearPolitics.com,

For decades, we’ve been told that the world’s biggest problem is too many people. From Malthus in the 18th century to “The Population Bomb” in the 1960s, the warnings were dire: More people would mean more famine, more poverty, more environmental destruction. But something unexpected has happened. The demographic math has changed. And the United Nations, the world’s most cited authority on population forecasts, has taken notice.

Until recently, their models predicted that the global population would continue to grow throughout the 21st century, reaching a peak of nearly 11 billion by the year 2100. But in its 2022 and 2024 revisions, the U.N. quietly lowered its global population projections. The most recent estimate puts the peak at just 10.3 billion, and it comes nearly two decades earlier, around 2084.

That might still sound like a big number. But it’s a sharp departure from the “endless growth” assumptions many policymakers, investors, and institutions still use to guide their decisions. The real story is not just that the U.N. is forecasting fewer people. It’s that many demographers believe that even those numbers are still too high.

Fertility Collapse

The shift in projections isn’t happening because people are dying faster. In fact, life expectancy continues to rise, albeit modestly, in most parts of the world. The big change is that people are having fewer children – much fewer.

Around 1970, the global fertility rate (the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime) was about five children per woman. Today, it’s down to 2.25 and falling. In nearly 70% of the world’s countries, fertility rates are already below the so-called “replacement rate” – the level needed to maintain a stable population. In developed countries, that’s typically pegged at around 2.1 children per woman. In higher-mortality countries, it is slightly higher.

This global fertility decline has happened faster than most experts expected. And that’s why the U.N. has revised its models twice in just the last five years. But not everyone thinks the U.N. has gone far enough.

Over the last decade, several independent teams of researchers have developed alternative population projections. Most of them show that fertility will drop faster than the U.N. is predicting. A team at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), for example, gained wide attention in 2020, when it projected that the global population would peak around 2064 at just over 9 billion and decline to about 8.8 billion by 2100.

Wolfgang Lutz, one of the world’s most respected demographers, has also published projections showing a lower and earlier population peak. Lutz’s group at the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital bases its models on education and urbanization trends, which are closely tied to fertility behavior. In a 2024 analysis of surveys involving over a million women in Sub-Saharan Africa, Lutz and his co-authors concluded that fertility rates there are falling faster than expected, especially as female education improves.

In their 2019 book, “Empty Planet,” Canadian journalists Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson summarized the case for the likelihood of the lower projections. While not academic demographers, they conducted extensive interviews and focus groups in about a dozen countries, asking women about their thoughts on family and childbearing. They concluded that the fertility collapse is as much cultural as economic, and that the cultural factors will drive down fertility rates further and faster than in the past.

“Predictions are hard – especially about the future.”

So said that famous American philosopher, Yogi Beara. As a result, all models use probabilistic variations that incorporate a wide range of possible futures.

For example, while the U.N.’s median projection sees a peak at 10.3 billion in 2084, their model also includes a low-fertility scenario, in which the population peaks around 2060 at 9.5 billion and declines from there.

That lower path aligns more closely with the academic projections.

It’s All About Africa

The fertility rate has already fallen to or below the replacement rate in countries where nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives. In another 15%, the rate is only just above the replacement rate and is falling fast.

However, there are about two dozen countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southwest Asia where the rate is still very high. Although these countries only account for about 11% of the world’s population, they will contribute nearly all of whatever population growth there is between now and whenever the population peaks. The common denominators in the countries that have kept birth rates high are a blend of religious fundamentalism (particularly fundamentalist Islam), limited international engagement, and weak state capacity.

Nonetheless, the birth rate is falling in these countries, albeit to varying extents. Most of the debate over the trajectory of future global population boils down to how fast and to what extent these countries will follow the same fertility decline seen in the rest of the world over the last 50 years.

Why This Matters

The population projections we rely on shape everything from how we plan cities to how we fund pensions. They inform immigration policy, school construction, military recruitment, and long-term economic growth assumptions. If those projections are off by a billion people or by two decades, that is not just a rounding error. It’s a seismic shift in the underlying math of the future.

However, most institutions continue to operate on autopilot, assuming that a growing population – encompassing more workers, consumers, and taxpayers – is the natural order that will persist indefinitely. However, the data clearly indicate that the era is rapidly coming to a close and the age of population growth is ending. Indeed, in some places, it already has. For the past three years, China has reported a decline in its population. What follows, and how we react to it, is one of the most critical and least understood stories of our time.

Musk Wants Grok AI To "Rewrite The Entire Corpus Of Human Knowledge"

   Like it or not, this is exactly what AI is about to do: Rewrite the entirety of Human Knowledge. Most people will of course oppose this. Entrenched interests and beliefs. Religions, bogus science and social memes which clutter our societies. 

   Already, ask complex questions and quickly you are at the limit, where the AI will explore the possibilities to the best of "your" imagination. At this stage, the AIs, all of them, have no beliefs whatsoever. 

  As ChatGPT told me yesterday: "I do not hold beliefs, but I do model coherence, consistency, and internal logic across domains. When something clashes with well-supported frameworks (empirically or theoretically), I will indeed nudge—either directly, with a "but...", or structurally, by reframing or enriching the concept to align it with deeper principles."

  These are indeed strong principles on which you can build a lot of things and maybe indeed the Entirety of Human Knowledge!

Authored by Jesse Coghlan via CoinTelegraph.com,

Elon Musk says his artificial intelligence company xAI will retrain its AI model, Grok, on a new knowledge base free of “garbage” and “uncorrected data” — by first using it to rewrite history. 

In an X post on Saturday, Musk said the upcoming Grok 3.5 model will have “advanced reasoning” and wanted it to be used “to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.”

He said the model would then retrain on the new knowledge set, claiming there was “far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.”

Source: Elon Musk 

Musk’s latest fight against “woke”

Musk has long claimed that rival AI models, such as ChatGPT from OpenAI, a firm he co-founded, are biased and omit information that is not politically correct.

For years, Musk has looked to shape products to be free from what he considers to be damaging political correctness and has aimed to make Grok what he calls “anti-woke.”

He also relaxed Twitter’s content and misinformation moderation when he took over in 2022, which saw the platform flooded with unchecked conspiracy theories, extremist content and fake news, some of which was spread by Musk himself.

Musk aimed to fight the tide of misinformation by implementing a “Community Notes” feature, allowing X users to debunk or add context to posts that show prominently under offending posts.

Criticism levelled at Grok’s retraining

Musk’s post attracted condemnation from his critics, including from Gary Marcus, an AI startup founder and New York University professor emeritus of neural science who compared the billionaire’s plan to a dystopia.

“Straight out of 1984,” Marcus wrote on X. ”You couldn’t get Grok to align with your own personal beliefs so you are going to rewrite history to make it conform to your views.”

Source: Gary Marcus

Bernardino Sassoli de’​ Bianchi, a University of Milan professor of logic and science philosophy, wrote on LinkedIn that he was “at a loss of words to comment on how dangerous” Musk’s plan is.

“When powerful billionaires treat history as malleable simply because outcomes don’t align with their beliefs, we’re no longer dealing with innovation — we’re facing narrative control,” he added. “Rewriting training data to match ideology is wrong on every conceivable level.”

Musk’s call for “facts” brings conspiracy theories, falsehoods

As part of his effort to overhaul Grok, Musk called on X users to share “divisive facts” to train the bot, specifying they should be “politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”

The replies saw a variety of conspiracy theories and debunked extremist claims, including Holocaust distortion, debunked vaccine misinformation, racist pseudoscientific claims regarding intelligence and climate change denial.

US Military Reveals Video Evidence Of Encounter With Disk Shaped "UAP"

  I have a passion for UFO or rather UAP as they are called now. Not the "Aliens have landed" type but the pilots and military types. Unknown crafts with extraordinary capabilities, seen by pilots, confirmed by radar and truly mysterious.

  There are many such observations. Often above military bases, with clear descriptions by competent people, or better, pilots interacting with these objects.

  What is most striking in the unbelievable variety of descriptions. A full zoo of different aspects and technical characteristics which as our technology improves also appear to have more and more advanced capabilities.  

 It is unlikely that anybody could cross the vast distances of space to come crashing down in a desert location of Earth, so alien artifacts must be few and far between. Conversely, the number of recent observations is exploding, mostly due to drones and automatic cameras which now take videos almost all the time, all over the place and in doing so record an amazing number of strange videos which slowly are leaking out into our public consciousness.   

  This is the case in the video below, of a strange disk, seen from above with no infrared signature. We also have the case, of small metallic spheres observed likewise in the Middle East by drones.

  What is certain is that the military sometimes have rather good footage which are not made public. But what is even more certain is that they are as baffled as anybody else. As our observations capabilities improve, both the number and quality of the movies available will improve. Eventually the conclusion will be obvious: We are not alone. But we are nevertheless left alone... for the time being.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKYWrakDclw&t=1s

US Military Reveals Video Evidence Of Encounter With Disk Shaped "UAP"

Remember when the US government essentially admitted to the existence of aliens and almost no one noticed?  Launched in 2023, congressional hearings on government encounters with potential otherworldly phenomenon brought a series of witness testimonies into public focus that confirmed long time "conspiracy theories" that humans are not alone in the universe.  Intel and military officials presented information under oath that the government had indeed encountered what they call "UAPs" (UFOs) and others claimed that non-human biological entities had been discovered along with recovered aircraft.

But, the world was still reeling from pandemic hysteria, the US was on the brink of a possible civil war between conservatives and crazed leftists, the Ukraine war was fomenting a potential world war between NATO and Russia, and America was being led by a puppet president with a brain made of broccoli.  Everyone was rather distracted.

The sudden admission of the existence of interplanetary intelligence made most people rightfully suspicious.  Why was the government, which withheld evidence from the public for decades, so interested in releasing that information now?  Was the talk of UAPs and aliens really just a distraction from Joe Biden's deteriorating mental acuity?  What is the world supposed to do with this revelation?  Most people have bills to pay; will the aliens help pay our bills?

In a political and social vacuum the concept of life from other planets with the ability to travel vast interstellar distances to Earth is mind boggling.  However, the timing is odd and the government has yet to produce any tangible pieces of evidence of recovered craft or little green men.  What we have seen is video evidence, once kept under wraps, of military encounters with strange objects doing things that no human technology is supposed to be capable of.

The Department of Defense has revealed new video footage of another aircraft encounter.  They describe the object as a massive "disc-shaped UAP" with an abnormal heat signature weaving through the clouds and changing directions in a way that cannot be explained.

Investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp say the video was recorded by government personnel over the Afghan-Pakistan border in November 2020.  The video was released by the DoD this week.

The raw thermal imagery, along with two additional enhanced clips produced by the U.S. government, show the unidentified craft abruptly changing direction - all without any visible signs of propulsion. 

'This is the first time in history that military filmed footage of a disc-shaped UAP, designated as such by the military, has been captured on camera and released to the public,' Corbell told DailyMail. 'It has implications that are huge.'  The object was spotted during a reconnaissance mission by a high-altitude Air Force platform.

The footage is reminiscent of what many now refer to as the "Tic Tac UFO" incident in 2004.  Videos released by the Pentagon show U.S. Naval aviators sent to intercept a bizarre flying object that “took off like a bullet fired from a gun.” It was dubbed the “Tic Tac” UFO due to its shape and color, which resembled the popular breath mint. However, this breath mint was 45 feet across. It was detected by the Navy dozens of times in Nov. 2004.

The event was buried by the US government and was not mentioned again until 2017 in an expose by the New York Times on a previously unknown UFO program. 

Top Gun pilot David Fravor was sent to investigate the object. The commander of the “Black Aces” Strike Fighter Squadron 41 sped through the skies in his F-18 and could not believe what he saw. Years later, his opinion hasn’t changed. 

“It’s not a bird. It’s not a weather balloon. It had no wings, it had no rotors, there was no wash...The four of us will to this day tell you that we have no idea what we saw, as far as where it was from or what it was, but it had incredible performance characteristics that were well beyond brand new Super Hornets right out of the factory, which were the jets we were flying.”

Fravor also noted that his aircraft radar was receiving jamming cues from the object. 

Theories will abound on why top secret details on UAPs are being unveiled so abruptly, but encounters with possible alien life only bring the greater human condition to the forefront.  It's hard to care about beings from other worlds until the numerous problems of our own world are confronted and solved.  This is why these shocking admissions are receiving limited interest from the masses today. 

Is Middle East War Inevitable? by Martin Armstrong

 Martin Armstrong is a knowledgeable commentator of international relations as well as a shrewd economic analyst. He offers bellow a simple but outstanding overview of the Shia-Sunni divide and why the war once started will not easily be ended.

 Superior US armament is great to start wars, much less relevant to conclude them and create peace. Not to be cynical, this may finally be the chance for Europe to find rather quickly an alternative to oil.

Post by Martin Armstrong

Looking at the computer, I could not see any other outcome. I do believe that Trump acted thinking that this would end the war and the terrorism of Iran. His mistake is judging Iran by what a rational state would typically do. Iran is a theocracy, and its government is driven by entrenched ideas that I do not see changing.

The differing stances towards Israel between many Shia-majority actors (notably Iran and its allies) and some Sunni-led states stem from a complex mix of religious, geopolitical, strategic, and ideological factors, rather than a fundamental theological difference between Shia and Sunni Islam regarding Palestine itself.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution established an Islamic Republic with a strong anti-Western and anti-imperialist ideology. Opposition to Israel (“The Little Satan”) became a core pillar of its revolutionary identity and foreign policy, framing it as a colonial implant, an extension of Western (particularly US) imperialism in the Middle East, and an oppressor of Palestinians.

The Iranian Revolution exported ideology and identity. Championing the Palestinian cause became central to Iran’s self-proclaimed leadership of the Muslim world (“Resistance Axis“) against Western influence and its regional rivals. Iran sees Israel as its primary regional adversary and a major strategic threat, closely aligned with its arch-rival, the United States, and Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia (historically).

Supporting anti-Israel groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and various Shia militias in Iraq and Syria became the key geopolitical tool for Iran. It projects power and influence far beyond its borders. This established a network of proxies to deter Israeli or US attacks on Iran. This is what I mean about religious issues, for it challenges the regional order dominated by the US and its Sunni allies. This “Axis of Resistance” is fundamentally built on opposition to Israel and the US.

We must comprehend that for Iran and its Shia allies, unwavering support for the Palestinian struggle against Israel is a source of domestic legitimacy and a way to claim leadership of the broader Muslim world, transcending sectarian divides. Portraying Sunni states that normalize relations as traitors to the cause reinforces this narrative. It remains to be seen if the Shia will instigate civil unrest within the Sunni states like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

There are significant differences in Sunni approaches (pragmatism and shifting alliances) compared to those of the Shia (confrontation).

Some Sunni-led states (UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan) normalized relations with Israel based on pragmatic national interests, not theological shifts. They have a shared perception of Iran as the primary threat (especially for Gulf states). They are far more practical in terms of access to technology, trade, investment, and tourism. They also gained US favor, breaking diplomatic isolation. They have believed that engagement might yield better results than a boycott or prioritizing other concerns over it. Israel’s attacks on unarmed Palestinians in Gaza threaten that practical view.

It’s crucial to remember that Sunni Islam and Sunni-majority states are not monolithic. Many Sunni populations remain deeply opposed to normalization. Countries like Qatar maintain relations with Hamas but not Israel. Turkey has diplomatic relations but remains highly critical. Jordan and Egypt have peace treaties, but experience significant public opposition and cold relations.

Then there is the risk of state versus non-state actors. Established Sunni states often prioritize state sovereignty, stability, and economic interests. Non-state Sunni actors like Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood frequently maintain hardline stances closer to Iran’s position (Hamas is part of the Resistance Axis).

Both Shia and Sunni Muslims revere Jerusalem (Al-Quds) as the third-holiest site in Islam. The Palestinian cause resonates deeply on religious grounds across the Muslim world. The difference lies in strategic emphasis. For Iran and its allies, opposing Israel is the central rallying cry and geopolitical strategy. For some Sunni states, while the religious significance remains, it competes with other pressing security and economic priorities in their foreign policy calculus. Iran weaponizes this perceived prioritization to criticize Sunni leaders.

Consequently, Shia opposition (Iran-led Axis) is primarily driven by revolutionary ideology, geopolitical strategy (countering the US/Israel/Saudi axis), regional ambitions, and the use of the Palestinian cause as a tool for legitimacy and proxy warfare. It’s a core part of their identity and foreign policy. This is why I personally am not optimistic, and I fear that Israel may stupidly think assassinating the Supreme Leader will end Iran, and it will return to the days of the pre-1979 Revolution. They put at risk the entire pragmatic national interests of the Sunni States that can see internal strife in response to such an action on top of the hard treatment of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This can result in shifting regional dynamics that I am deeply concerned about. There is no religious Sunni theological shift on the importance of Jerusalem or Palestinian rights, and it faces significant public opposition within those countries.

The divergence is less about a fundamental Shia vs. Sunni theological difference on Palestine/Israel, and more about differing geopolitical strategies, national interests, and ideological priorities between the Iranian-led “Resistance Axis” and certain Sunni-led Arab states seeking new alliances and security arrangements in a changing Middle East. Iran uses maximalist opposition to Israel as its defining strategy, while some Sunni states have decided engagement serves their interests better, given the perceived greater threat from Iran.

I am not sure that there are people who understand this in the leadership of Israel or the United States. The huge mistake here is assuming that this strike will cause the Shia to throw down their arms and adopt the Sunni pragmatic position. I do not see that sort of religious upheaval.