Professor Jiang is basically guessing.

"a broken clock is right twice a day"

“You will not hear me talk about or criticize the leadership of China. I’m not allowed to discuss that. And they are always right.” – Jiang Xueqin

2.5 million people have Professor Jiang of Predictive History explain geopolitics to them.

His videos are plagued with religious eschatology, a lack of scientific understanding, and cherry-picked historical analogies, all of which his critically thinking students don’t call him out for.

Jiang’s relevancy only comes from two successful predictions:

1. Trump would win 2024

2. Trump would attack Iran

3. The third one, that the U.S. would lose that war, remains unconfirmed. (and hard to falsify)

I don’t think any of these predictions are impressive in the slightest. 77,303,568 people voted for Trump in 2024, and 76% of them expected a Trump victory, while 12% of the 75,019,230 Kamala voters thought Trump would win. If you do basic math, this means 67 million Americans predicted that Trump would win in 2024. That leaves us with a single confirmed prediction where Jiang scores points, the Iran one. Credit where it’s due, Jiang had the balls to come out confidently with his correct prediction in this one case. There could’ve been thousands of crackhead conspiracy theorists willing to do the same.

Now, the third one, if proven correct, would turn out to be decently impressive; Jiang’s framework, however, fails to rationally justify his bold prediction. The Professor seems to love cherry picking analogies. In “Geo-Strategy 8: The Iran Trap”, his lecture is hard carried by analogizing Operation Epic Fury to the Athenian expedition against Sicily in 415 BCE. It seems to be the case that he only chose a specific instance of a democracy being overconfident and overstretched because his narrative finds it congenial.

His Iran trap lecture simply has terrible methodology.

The only semblance to game theory I can even find is him painting a vaguely holistic picture of geopolitics as a “zero-sum” game with actors, actions, and goals; Jiang seems to use that term very gratuitously as a rhetorical device without having to really develop a prediction framework. His lack of a framework also constitutes a lack of falsifiability, pretty accurately reflecting his audience’s usage of immunizing stratagems when his guesses turn out wrong.

If you’re forming future predictions through what has happened in the past, consider an emerald that is currently green, but will turn blue tomorrow (a “grue” emerald). Every single emerald is currently green before tomorrow rolls around, therefore every single emerald is also grue. The fact that all emeralds are green right now doesn’t confirm the prediction that they will stay green tomorrow any more than the prediction that they will turn blue tomorrow.

Jiang looks at Athens in 415 BCE and America in 2026, identifying the two situations as analogous. When he does that, he’s using a predicate to group them together: a dominant, democratic power overextending into a foreign theater, just like the emeralds being green. You can just as easily conjure up a new predicate: a dominant, democratic power losing a land war before 2000 CE, but a dominant, democratic power winning an aerial war after 2000 CE, quite literally the case of the grue emerald, involving a land war loss before the year 2000, but an air war victory after the year 2000.

Predicates can be more credible or entrenched than other predicates due to their successful use. Jiang’s way of choosing a specific predication seems unwarranted, as he’s never proved why his specific instance is more “credible” than other instances that can inductively predict a U.S. victory in Iran!

His lecture (using the word gratuitously) proves that the U.S. will win the war in Iran just as much as it predicts that the U.S. will lose the war in Iran. Other cases of “imperial overreach” like Vietnam and Afghanistan happened before the U.S.’s contemporary air doctrine—you can cite Kosovo as a successful implementation of the U.S.’s air doctrine, say the U.S. will therefore win the war against Iran, and have an argument just as powerful as Jiang’s—which is to say, not a powerful argument.

Even if he turns out to be right, his irrational way of getting to the right answer makes it hard for me to give him credit—even when you construct a holistic model from some of the stuff he’s lectured on, the model turns out quite bad.

Now, if you were to put some pieces together from Jiang’s lectures, you can derive a rudimentary prediction model. Predictive history simply asks:

1. What does each individual actor want?

2. What does the incentive map look like?

3. Given 1 and 2, what outcomes do these incentives lead to?

I’d say it’s a pretty bad model. The third step is where actual results can be synthesized from an extremely basic game theory—I’d say there is a clear pitfall between taking 1 & 2 then plugging them into 3; there isn’t really a way to isolate incentive maps to the point where every interaction mirrors that of a previous scenario, and just play them out like games of Risk.

Any actor within Jiang’s model is assumed to be a rational utility-maxxer that strives to reach the sole aim of achieving rational goals. That is a bloodless way of representing decision-making. Leaders constantly pursue abstractions and often historicist fantasies or act in self-interest in a way that makes it near impossible to pinpoint their actual motives, leaders have a higher propensity towards irrational risk-taking when they see themselves as losing. I doubt that any rational person views the sitting President of the U.S. as a sane, rational utility seeker.

Two weeks ago, Jiang told Patrick Bet-David that a “multivector ground invasion” would happen that weekend, but few of his fans seemed to talk about that. Jiang even seemed quite confident, as strikes on Kharg Island took place the same day.

He predicted that Trump would win in 2024 (along with millions of other uneducated and educated people alike), picking Nikki Haley as his Vice President.

JD Vance was chosen, and Jiang “revised” his prediction, with his audience claiming a partial victory because Vance was the “second likeliest”. If your model can’t accurately predict between two very likely outcomes, that diminishes your model’s credibility! A person with a real model would’ve stated:

1. What mechanisms in the model caused an incorrect prediction.

2. How the model was adjusted/remedied to prevent such incorrect predictions.

3. The new prediction stemming from the revised model.

Jiang should’ve been able to do this not only for the Nikki Haley prediction, but also for his failed Marine Le Pen prediction and his Mohammad Mokhber prediction. I’ve yet to see any real explanations for his “model” malfunctioning during these three instances.

It is very uninteresting how Jiang lives in China, teaches in China, but refuses to speak on anything related to China. He praises China in an interview with Mehdi Hasan, depicting Chinese leadership as solely dedicated to world peace and collective prosperity.

I’m 90% sure that he’s not in on anything—though his refusal to speak about China puts him into a double-bind.

“So things I can’t talk about are the Tibet-Taiwan issues, the Xinjiang issues. I cannot talk about this. I cannot name specific individuals in China who hold leadership positions. So you will not hear me talk about or criticize the leadership of China. I’m not allowed to discuss that. I’m not allowed to discuss the limitations of the military because they are invincible. And they are always right. There are lots of things I can’t talk about.”

The chance that he’s someone rhetorically appeasing his audience as a propaganda mouthpiece is much much lower relative to the chance that he’s simply averse to the consequences of speaking about China to the West while living in China.

Either:

1. Jiang’s predictions have a China-shaped hole in them: He self-censors out of self-preservation. He has to exclude the world’s largest economy from all of his predictions. That makes his predictions much less reliable!

2. He’s a propagandist: There’s no reason to believe anything he’s saying.

Both of these scenarios have some bad implications for his model. He has to pivot towards conjuring up “Pax Judaica” theories, where the 2nd strongest country on earth is missing.

Professor Jiang clearly understands political science. He understands how democracies oust bad leaders and terminate bad policies, he knows the type of resilience democracies have—all while calling the world’s largest and most successful democracy an “empire”. Jiang graduated from Yale with majors in English and math; he is no less delusional than any of us when it comes to geopolitics. He has some of the worst epistemics I’ve ever seen; his audience seems to compensate for this by overblowing every correct prediction he makes.

Since you made it this far, here is a quote from the professor himself regarding democracy.

“The best thing about America is the First Amendment. The best thing is that anyone can criticize the president. And there’s rigorous debate right now over this Iran war. And this allows for America to pivot and to be resilient. And to discover its weaknesses and to improve on its weaknesses, on its vulnerabilities. China has been China for the past 5,000 years. This is not a good thing.”

The professor said it himself. Take notes.

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