Just stumbled on something wild while scrolling through YouTube. There's this Beijing high school teacher named Jiang Xueqin who made three predictions back in May 2024 that are genuinely haunting how accurate they turned out to be.

First, he predicted Trump would win the election. Then he said the US would get drawn into a war with Iran. And third—this is the unsettling part—he said America would lose that war and it would reshape the entire global order. All three called out in a classroom video with no fancy production, just him and a blackboard.

Two out of three already happened. Trump won in November 2024. The US and Israel launched strikes on Iran in February 2026. Now we're living through the third prediction, and honestly, his logic for why the US is losing is kind of terrifying.

That's probably why Tucker Carlson had him on his show recently. Carlson's been exiled from the MAGA crowd after publicly opposing the Iran strikes, calling them "disgusting and utterly evil." Trump literally said Carlson lost his way. So when Carlson needed someone to articulate why this war might be unwinnable, he brought in Jiang Xueqin.

The guy's core argument: the US military is basically a Cold War relic—expensive, technology-focused, but terrible at grinding through prolonged wars of attrition. You're using million-dollar interceptor missiles against $50,000 drones. That math doesn't work over time.

But here's where it gets darker. Jiang Xueqin pointed out that Iran has a move that could collapse everything: attack the desalination plants across the Gulf. Kuwait gets 90% of its drinking water from desalination. Saudi Arabia gets 70%. Destroy those, and you're looking at regional humanitarian collapse. He said this in early March. Five days later, Iran attacked a desalination plant in Bahrain. Like, exact prediction.

On Carlson's show, Jiang Xueqin went even further. He basically said the entire modern global economy is built on cheap energy and the petrodollar system. If the US can't control the Gulf, countries stop buying dollars, and suddenly the US economy—which he called a Ponzi scheme relying on foreign dollar purchases—starts collapsing. The US has $39 trillion in debt. That cycle breaks, everything breaks.

So what happens next according to him? The war drags on like Ukraine. The US can't leave because Iran fills the vacuum. Energy gets expensive. Countries start rearming. Global supply chains collapse and we return to mercantilism. Trump probably orders a nationwide draft. Street riots. National Guard deployments. Years of factional violence.

He actually said this year could look like the movie that won Best Picture for World War scenarios—except it won't be hypothetical anymore.

What's interesting is who Jiang Xueqin actually is. He's not some random doomsayer. He grew up in Toronto after immigrating from China at six, went to Yale for English Lit, then spent twenty years working as a journalist, documentary director, and education reformer before returning to Beijing. He teaches philosophy and Western classics at a private school. His whole framework comes from what he calls "psychohistory"—the idea that history has structural patterns you can analyze to predict futures.

The guy basically trained himself to see through surface-level noise and identify the underlying forces shaping events. That's not expertise in one narrow field—it's a way of thinking that cuts across everything.

What's stuck with me is something he said in class: a correct historical framework should connect the past, explain the present, and predict the future simultaneously. Only then are you approaching truth. His three predictions are testing that framework in real time, and so far it's holding up in ways that are uncomfortable to watch.

The reason he stayed in the classroom instead of becoming a full-time analyst? Not because it's safer, but because there are still people there willing to ask serious questions. That feels like the most important detail in this whole story.