Historic Prediction: The Chinese Nostradamus and the Iran War That Never Was

With Trump's signing of a peace agreement at Versailles (we see what you did there, Macron) and the Iran War crawling to a close, let’s revisit the three predictions that saw the so-called independent media elevate "Professor" Jiang Xueqin from obscure Chinese high-school teacher to world-class geopolitical analyst. Earning their prognosticator the title of the Chinese Nostradamus, and popularised in a very brief viral video clipped from the opening of an hour-long episode in the sprawling 12-part Geo-Strategies series on his Predictive History YouTube channel, these were:

1. Trump will win in November.

2. The United States will go to war against Iran.

3. The United States will lose this war, forever changing the global order.

   
   

The devil, however, is very much in the details that our alternative media overlords never even bothered to examine.

The less-than-prophetic prediction of a Trump win came in May 2024, at a time when Biden's approval ratings were weak, Trump was leading in swing-state polls and betting markets were heavily favouring him. Furthermore, what Jiang actually predicted was a Trump-Haley win, despite Trump having definitively ruled Nikki Haley out as a running mate earlier that month. Her presence was, however, key to Jiang’s narrative, which needed Trump surrounded by hawks (as Bush was with Cheney and Rumsfeld) to push him beyond his first-term "maximum pressure" campaign of withdrawing from the nuclear deal, reimposing sweeping sanctions, designating the IRGC a terrorist organisation and ordering the killing of Qassem Soleimani, to what was predicted to come next.

Far from predicting the 2026 Iran War we actually saw, what Jiang outlined was a March 2027 near beat-by-beat rerun of Operation Iraqi Freedom called Operation Iranian Freedom, including an Iranian-linked terror attack on US soil, claims of an imminent WMD threat, broad coalition support (including the UK, Australia, the UAE and Poland), and a shock-and-awe opening followed by boots on the ground being warmly welcomed as liberators. Demonstrating just how far off he was, Jiang had the US pre-emptively moving the USS Gerald R. Ford into the Strait of Hormuz to protect shipping, because leaving that unsecured would be a schoolboy error, right?

With boots on the ground in Iran, a now seemingly inconceivable requirement of Jiang’s narrative, he shifts from a pure pastiche of the Iraq War to a broader mélange drawing on the Afghanistan and Vietnam wars, complete with rapid military success, a grinding insurgency, regional escalation and ultimate strategic failure. His elaborate scenario-building to carry the US Marines into Tehran then gives way to broad claims about nationalism, insurgency and the limits of military power. What has been sold as a bold prediction of the future is nothing more than a familiar retelling of America's past failures.

Just as Jiang's Iran War scenario was merely a bricolage of previous conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, the so-called “Professor” himself seems to be nothing more than a pick-and-mix caricature of a geopolitical expert. A veritable Chinese Nostradamus, if you will, whose reputation owes more to our willingness to reinterpret his fanciful fables after the fact than to any real predictive success. A confident parodist elevated to oracle by media platforms whose editorial standards seem to regard virality as evidence of credibility. The real devil here, I can only conclude, was in these outlets' shocking lack of attention to detail.