Donald Trump's 'holy war' with Iranwill spiral into a global crisis that could destroy Europe and shatter America's alliances within a decade, according to Beijing‑based academicJiang Xueqin, the commentator nicknamed 'China's Nostradamus'by his online followers. His forecast is based on historical analysis and speculative reasoning rather than verified data and has gained viral attention online amid rising US‑Iran tensions.

Jiang has built a small but fervent international audience by claiming to fuse close reading of history with game theory to anticipate geopolitical shocks. In the material shared by his supporters, he is credited with predicting Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 US election and warning that a Trump return to the White House would make a US–Iran war 'very likely.' Both of those developments, they say, have now come to pass, and Jiang has moved on to a darker set of forecasts about how that conflict unfolds.

In a recent video, Jiang argues that Trump's Iran campaign is not simply another Middle East intervention, but the opening chapter in what some inside the US military purportedly see as a biblical showdown. Citing unverified accounts, he says certain American troops have been told by commanders that Trump has been 'anointed by Jesus' to wage a holy war against Iran, a mission framed as potentially triggering Armageddon and Christ's return.

Jiang believes this apocalyptic mindset is not fringe but common among evangelical Christians who, in his view, now wield significant influence around Trump and across Washington. He uses the theological term 'eschatology' for this obsession with the End Times and suggests it shapes strategic decisions in ways that secular analysts have been slow to understand.

That religious framing, he contends, feeds directly into his first major prediction. The United States, he says, will be forced to deploy ground forces into Iran, a country four times the size of Iraq and far more mountainous. Air strikes and proxies will not be enough to control the terrain. Once American boots are on the ground, he warns, the US will confront a Vietnam-style backlash at home as 'a lot of young people' refuse to fight, mass protests erupt and the National Guard is mobilised to contain unrest.

The result, in his view, is not simply a foreign war, but a lurch towards internal conflict inside the US itself.

From there, Jiang's forecast widens out. He claims the Iran war will devastate the Gulf Cooperation Council, the bloc that includes Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman and has long operated as a broadly US-aligned economic and security hub.

'What's happening in this war is that the economies of the GCC are being destroyed and that's part of the plan,' Jiang alleges, arguing without documentary evidence that Washington is willing to sacrifice Gulf partners in pursuit of a larger religiously freighted agenda. Officials in GCC states have not commented on his theory and there is no confirmation that such a plan exists.

He then sketches a second phase in which Turkey and Saudi Arabia are drawn directly into the fighting against Iran. That expansion, he suggests, serves a domestic purpose for hardline US evangelicals by weakening any political resistance to their End Times beliefs. For Turkey and the Gulf states, though, he predicts severe economic and military damage.

As the conflict grinds on, Jiang expects escalation around Jerusalem. One of his most incendiary predictions is that the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third holiest site, will be badly damaged or destroyed. He notes that it sits at the centre of competing Israeli and Palestinian claims and recalls that in April 2024, during Iranian attacks on Israel, then-supreme leader Ali Khamenei posted in Hebrew that 'Al-Quds will be in the hands of the Muslims.' Jiang offers no concrete mechanism for Al-Aqsa's destruction, but treats it as a likely flashpoint in an Iran–Israel confrontation.

Source: International Business Times UK