A lecture delivered by Canadian educator and historian Jiang Xueqin in May 2024 has recently surged in views—now surpassing 680,000—after multiple geopolitical events he forecasted began to play out in real time.
Titled “Why America Will Invade Iran and Lose,” the video is now circulating widely as the U.S. finds itself at the centre of an intensifying conflict in the Middle East, following President Donald Trump’s recent airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities.
Jiang is known for his education reform advocacy and for promoting critical thinking in classrooms. His “Predictive History” channel offers geopolitical forecasts by drawing on historical analogy and game theory, with the aim of predicting future conflicts before they unfold.
A Yale graduate and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Jiang is also a regular speaker at international education summits.
Jiang’s prediction was rooted in three historical precedents: the Sicilian Expedition by ancient Athens, the Vietnam War, and the ongoing Ukraine conflict. All involved major powers overestimating their capabilities, underestimating local resistance, and misjudging the strategic costs of invasion.
“To win a war,” Jiang said, “you need to avoid encirclement, mass your forces, and protect your supply lines. Iran’s geography and political unity would make all three impossible.”
In his 2024 lecture, Jiang dissected the convergence of interests among three key actors—Iran, Israel, and Donald Trump—who, despite different motivations, all benefit from a U.S. invasion.
For Iran, Jiang argued, war represents a golden opportunity to unify a fractured population under a nationalist banner and to expel American influence from the region.
Facing international sanctions, economic hardship, and domestic unrest, the Iranian regime would rally popular support against a foreign invader. Jiang noted that Iran’s optimal strategy would be to provoke the U.S. into committing ground troops, which could then be bogged down in mountainous terrain and isolated by severed supply lines.
Israel, he explained, has strategic interests that diverge from America’s long-term goals. While the U.S. seeks balance and influence across the Middle East, certain factions in Israel, according to Jiang, aim for dominance.
He cited the so-called “Greater Israel” vision—rooted in religious interpretations of biblical promises—as an influential ideology that seeks to expand Israel’s reach from the Nile to the Euphrates. In Jiang’s analysis, Israel benefits from a scenario where both Iran and the U.S. are weakened through prolonged conflict, allowing it to fill the resulting power vacuum.
As for Trump, Jiang described him not as a strategist but as a media-driven leader, akin to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. Both, Jiang argued, prioritise optics over battlefield logic.
Trump, according to Jiang, views war not as a geopolitical manoeuvre but as a political tool to consolidate power, distract from domestic issues, and ultimately dismantle the so-called “American empire” he believes betrayed him in 2020. A failed military campaign could paradoxically empower Trump, giving him pretext to seize greater control and possibly extend his rule.
Jiang also highlighted the structural delusions within the U.S. military establishment, which he claimed is trapped in a post-2003 doctrine of “shock and awe” that prioritises air supremacy and special forces while neglecting the traditional principles of mass mobilisation and sustained ground logistics.
He pointed to recent U.S. failures, such as the inability to defeat the Houthis in the Red Sea, as evidence that the American military cannot win protracted ground wars without public support or infantry numbers.
Furthermore, Jiang invoked the concept of “escalation dominance”—the belief that a superpower can control the pace and scale of conflict through superior force. He argued that this theory actually makes the U.S. vulnerable. As Iran calibrates its responses to appear justified, the U.S. is forced to respond in kind to preserve credibility, leading to a series of escalations that make war inevitable.
His lecture concluded with a hypothetical scenario set in 2027, where Trump announces “Operation Iranian Freedom.”
The plan includes multilateral support from allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UK, and Australia. But once troops are deployed and appear to control key territories, the logistical nightmare begins: they cannot retreat, they cannot advance through the mountains, and their supply chains are vulnerable to ambush. “They look like soldiers,” Jiang said. “But they are really hostages.”
In a recent follow-up video recorded on 23 June, Jiang reaffirmed his predictions after Trump launched the bombing campaign. “All three players—Trump, Israel, and Iran—want the U.S. to invade,” he declared. He reiterated that this alignment of interests would ultimately trap American forces in an unwinnable war, with dire consequences for global stability.
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