The geopolitical analyst who predicted theUS-Iran warbefore it began has warned that the conflict will become America's next 'forever war,' choking off global fertiliser supply and leaving six billion people at risk of starvation.

Jiang Xueqin, the Chinese-born commentator known online as 'Professor Jiang' and widely dubbed 'China's Nostradamus', laid out the warning during a two-hour appearance onThe Diary of a CEOwith Steven Bartlett.

His starkest claim centred on fertiliser. The Strait of Hormuz, the 33-kilometre chokepoint Iran has effectively shut since the conflict began, is the corridor through which a large share of the world's fertiliser components normally flow. With insurers refusing to cover vessels, those shipments have stalled.

'The world depends on fertiliser,' Jiang told Bartlett, referencing an earlier episode of the podcast featuring economist Steve Keen. 'Without fertilizers, the world could only sustain at most two billion people.'

That leaves six billion without a reliable food source. 'What are the six billion people going to do? Just starve to death? No. They're going to migrate,' he said. 'And this is going to create a huge global crisis throughout the world.'

Jiang's six billion figure is his own extrapolation, but institutional data supports the broader alarm. TheFood and Agriculture Organizationwarned this month that one-third of all globally traded fertiliser normally transits the Strait of Hormuz, and the scarcity will reduce crop yields into late 2026 and 2027. The World Food Programme has separately estimated the disruption could push 45 million additional people into hunger.

Research fromOur World in Dataputs the dependency in context. Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, produced through the Haber-Bosch process, support approximately 48 per cent of the current global population. Remove those inputs entirely and roughly 3.5 to four billion people lose their primary food source.

Keen, an honorary professor at University College London who predicted the 2008 financial crash, warned during his own Diary of a CEO appearance in April that India could exhaust its fertiliser stockpiles within two to three months. 'Food production on the planet could fall 10-25 per cent and there simply won't be enough food for everyone on the planet,' he said. 'Then it's a question of who's going to starve.'

Jiang added that the Gulf Cooperation Council nations, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, import 80 to 90 per cent of their own food despite being major fertiliser exporters. The region, in his telling, sits at the centre of compounding vulnerabilities.

Jiang framed the food and energy fallout not as collateral damage but as strategic logic. A prolonged war forces the rest of the world to buy American energy, he argued, propping up the dollar. 'This war in Iran benefits America tremendously. So why not have it go on for a long, long time?' he said.

Source: International Business Times UK