On March 21, Tucker Carlson, a well-known American media personality, released his latest interview program.
The guest was not a senator, a retired general, or a prominent scholar from a Washington think tank, but a Chinese man named Jiang Xueqin. His daily identity is that of a history and philosophy teacher at a private high school called "Lunar Exploration School" in Beijing's Chaoyang District.
The program, which lasted over an hour, covered topics ranging from the trajectory of the Iran war to the possibility of Japan's nuclearization, Israel's strategic calculations, the actual combat capabilities of U.S. ground forces, and Trump's role in all of this.
To truly understand this episode, we must start with Tucker Carlson.
The Lost Tucker Carlson
If someone were to ask who the political journalist who best represents the core spirit of America in this era is, Tucker Carlson would be an unavoidable name.
Tucker Carlson
He is a top political commentator in the United States. His show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, has long held the number one spot in the ratings for political programs in the United States and is the most important discourse platform for the conservative camp.
More importantly, he is one of the most important media allies of the MAGA movement. Trump considers him "one of his own," and the two appeared together multiple times during the 2024 election. Carlson is practically the loudest voice for the MAGA movement in the media arena.
But everything changed after the US and Israel launched a joint military strike against Iran in February.
Carlson publicly condemned the war, calling the joint strikes "disgusting and utterly evil," and stated unequivocally, "This is Israel's war, not America's war." Trump immediately removed him from MAGA: "Tucker has lost his way. He is not MAGA. MAGA is about making America great again, MAGA is about America First, and Tucker is none of that."
Carlson subsequently publicly claimed that the CIA was preparing to prosecute him for "unregistered foreign agent" simply because he had text message contact with Iranians before the outbreak of the war.
This war thus evolved into a rift between the MAGA camp and the establishment: the establishment attempted to reverse its decline through the war, while a group represented by Carlson believed it was digging its own grave. Trump's expulsion of Carlson from MAGA is a microcosm of this internal division.
Carlson's current situation is highly ironic: he had repeatedly predicted on his show that the "deep government" would use legal means to suppress dissent. But now he himself has become a dissident.
At this critical juncture, he invited Jiang Xueqin—a Beijing high school teacher who predicted two years ago that the United States would lose the war—to sit in his camera lens.
Three predictions that made him famous
In May 2024, Biden was still in the White House, and Trump hadn't even experienced the two failed assassination attempts that summer; the election was far from clear. Yet, in what seemed like an ordinary class, Jiang Xueqin made three predictions to his students:
1. Trump will win the election in November.
2. The United States will be drawn into a war against Iran.
3. The United States will lose this war, and this will forever alter the global order.
Looking back now, both of the first two predictions have come true:
On November 5, 2024, Trump defeated his opponent Harris in the US presidential election.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military strike against Iran.
Screenshot from the video "Predictive History"
The third prediction is still ongoing.
He uploaded all of this classroom content to his YouTube channel, "Predictive History." There were no subtitles, no editing, just a neatly dressed Professor Jiang and a blackboard. According to him, the channel was inspired by the concept of "psychohistory" from science fiction writer Isaac Asimov: believing that history has structural laws and that the future can be predicted through mathematical models and analysis of group psychology.
After the outbreak of the Iraq War, this old video from 2024 went viral online, with comments full of amazement from Americans. This also made Jiang Xueqin famous, with the video garnering over 4 million views in a single day and the channel accumulating over 2 million subscribers.
Will the United States lose this Middle East war?
In 415 BC, Athens, immersed in the illusion of its imperial peak, rashly regarded Sicily as an easy target. They dispatched the most luxurious expeditionary fleet in history, but due to the disruption of supply lines and the collapse of domestic support, they buried an entire generation of their most elite young men, along with almost all their savings, in that distant land.
This is Jiang Xueqin's historical analogy to the potential fate of the United States after "getting involved in Iran".
His core argument is that the U.S. military is essentially a Cold War-era "muscle-show" system, costly and focused on technological deterrence rather than the resilience needed for a protracted war of attrition. This mismatch manifests in reality as an absurd asymmetry, such as using interceptor missiles costing millions of dollars to counter a drone costing only $50,000.
Even after the war began, Jiang Xueqin still believed that Iran had the advantage over the United States. In an interview with the American independent news and political talk show Breaking Points on March 3, he pointed out that Iran held a sinister trump card: to paralyze the entire petrodollar system within weeks by attacking desalination facilities in the Gulf region.
Kuwait gets 90% of its drinking water from desalination, while Saudi Arabia gets 70%. Systemic damage to these facilities would exacerbate regional instability and could further trigger a humanitarian disaster and migration crisis in the Gulf region.
Jiang Xueqin at Breaking Points
Just five days after the program aired, on March 8, Iran attacked a desalination plant in Bahrain.
Seawater desalination plants in the Middle East
On Tucker Carlson's show, Jiang Xueqin's predictions went further and were even more unsettling:
The modern global economy is built on the premise that energy is cheap and readily available. But this premise is now crumbling.
A Dialogue between Tucker Carlson and Jiang Xueqin
Jiang Xueqin believes the war with Iran will be highly similar to the war with Ukraine: it will drag on and become a war of attrition. The United States cannot withdraw, because if it does, the only regional power capable of filling the security vacuum is Iran. And since about one-fifth of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz every day, if the Gulf states align themselves with Iran, the petrodollar system will collapse.
His statement was very direct: "The current US economy is essentially a Ponzi scheme, relying on foreign countries to continuously buy dollars to keep it running." The US is currently burdened with nearly $39 trillion in debt, and for decades has relied on oil-producing countries to settle oil transactions in dollars, with the money flowing back into the US economy. If this cycle were to break, the consequences would be devastating.
Based on this assessment, he outlined three major trends that he believed would occur regardless of who won or lost: deindustrialization due to expensive energy, countries being forced to rearm, and the return of mercantilism after the collapse of global supply chains.
He also predicted that in order to maintain the front lines, Trump would most likely order a nationwide draft, which would trigger street riots, leading to the deployment of the National Guard. "So, unfortunately, the United States will likely experience years of factional violence," he said on the program.
Under this logic, this year's Oscar-winning film (World War I II) may no longer be a hypothetical scenario on screen, but rather a final rehearsal before a systemic collapse.
His prediction base
Jiang Xueqin's life story is itself a history of cross-border practice. He immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of six and grew up in Toronto. With a scholarship, he was admitted to Yale University, majoring in English Literature. After graduating, he returned to China. For nearly twenty years thereafter, he worked as a journalist, documentary director, and UN project officer, while also becoming deeply involved in China's education reform practices.
In 2022, he returned to Beijing and joined the Lunar Exploration School. Its founder, Wang Xiqiao, born in the 1990s, is also an active educational innovator.
The educational logic of lunar exploration is inherently consistent with the direction that Jiang Xueqin has been cultivating for twenty years: abandoning the evaluation of students based on subject scores and emphasizing problem-solving in the real world.
Jiang Xueqin on the official website of the Lunar Exploration School
Jiang Xueqin teaches a year-round course in Western philosophy here, guiding students to read works such as Gilgamesh, Plato's Republic, and Descartes' Meditations. But what he truly wants to teach his students is to examine themselves and the world from a higher, more critical, and more objective perspective.
This is the underlying ability upon which he made those three predictions—not the accumulation of knowledge in a particular professional field, but a way of thinking that penetrates appearances and identifies structural patterns.
Those who understand the underlying principles are rare in any era.
Jiang Xueqin once said in class that a correct historical framework should simultaneously accomplish three things: connect the past, explain the present, and predict the future. Only by doing all three can one approach the truth.
The flames of desalination plants and the cracks in the petrodollar system are inevitable manifestations of structural forces reaching a certain point. The allure of Asimov's "psychohistory" lies precisely in its belief that beneath the surface of chaos, history possesses its own grammar. His three predictions serve as a self-validation of this framework in reality.
But the framework itself doesn't provide answers. This is probably why Jiang Xueqin chose to stay in the classroom—not because the classroom is safe enough, but because there are still people there willing to ask serious questions.