Professor Jiang's Three Terrifying Predictions: The Next 9/11 May Target Your Bank Account

In a popular podcast, Professor Jiang — who went viral for predicting the Iran war — laid out a deeply unsettling worldview: he believes human civilization is on the edge of collapse, and that the "petrodollar system" underpinning modern prosperity is unraveling. This article breaks down his core arguments and three major predictions, and offers a critical analysis of his framework.

The Petrodollar System: The Invisible Pillar of Modern Civilization

Professor Jiang's analysis begins with the post-WWII global economic order. In 1945, the United States leveraged its industrial dominance to supply goods to Europe and the world, lending dollars in exchange for gold repayment. As America shifted from creditor to debtor nation, Nixon announced the decoupling of the dollar from gold in 1971 — an event known as the "Nixon Shock."

To sustain demand for the dollar after decoupling, three things followed: Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern nations agreed to price oil exclusively in dollars, giving rise to the "petrodollar"; China, in the late 1970s, committed to settling cheap manufactured goods in dollars; and Japan, in the 1980s, channeled its savings into U.S. Treasuries through the Plaza Accord. In his view, the dollar is essentially a "promise" — China promises manufactured goods, Saudi Arabia promises oil, Japan promises to buy debt.

Professor Jiang uses a semiconductor chip to illustrate how elegantly this system operates. Silicon, gallium, and germanium — three critical elements — largely come from China. Chips are designed by American companies (Nvidia, Apple), Dutch firm ASML supplies $400 million lithographic machines, Taiwan and Malaysia handle fabrication, and final assembly takes place in China. "When you look at a single semiconductor, what you're really seeing is the entire world converging."

The Nixon Shock is a pivotal moment for understanding the evolution of the postwar international monetary system. The 1944 Bretton Woods Conference established a dollar-centric fixed exchange rate regime: currencies were pegged to the dollar, which in turn committed to exchanging gold at $35 per ounce. The system functioned well during postwar reconstruction, but as Vietnam War spending soared, European and Japanese economies recovered, and the U.S. trade surplus narrowed, dollars flooded overseas. Foreign central banks began redeeming dollars for gold en masse, and U.S. gold reserves fell from a postwar peak of roughly 20,000 tonnes to under 10,000 tonnes by 1971. On August 15, 1971, Nixon unilaterally announced the suspension of dollar-to-gold convertibility, collapsing the Bretton Woods system and ushering in the era of floating exchange rates. The petrodollar agreement (reached with Saudi Arabia around 1974) emerged in this context as a search for a new anchor for dollar demand — replacing gold's backing role with the requirement that oil be priced in dollars, thereby preserving the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.

The Core Formula: Technological Progress = Specialization × Globalization

Professor Jiang proposes a concise formula: Technological Progress = Specialization × Globalization. He argues that all technological advancement rests on the premise that more nations can specialize and trade freely — supported by two pillars: the dollar as the world's reserve currency, and American military hegemony.

From this, he derives his most pessimistic conclusion: we have already hit the peak of technological progress. The Iran war will trigger a chain reaction, forcing nations toward "generalization" (de-specialization) and "nationalism" (de-globalization), as they build self-sufficient supply chains. When both specialization and globalization retreat simultaneously, technological progress must decline.

He repeatedly invokes the word "collapse" and draws a historical analogy to the Bronze Age Collapse: at that time, bronze depended on copper and tin sourced from different regions, making the world highly integrated — but climate change triggered famines, migrations (the "Sea Peoples") destabilized the order, and nearly the entire Mediterranean civilization collapsed within roughly 50 years. He believes the modern world is heading toward a similar outcome.

The "Decentralized" Nature of Middle East Conflict

Facing the pushback that "the Middle East has always been at war," Professor Jiang stresses the fundamental difference from the 2003 Iraq War. In 2003, the U.S. could neutralize Saddam's regime with a "shock and awe" decapitation strike — but today, Iran, Yemen's Houthi forces, Lebanon's Hezbollah, and Iraqi Shia militias are decentralized, fanatical, and share a religious eschatology, spanning the entire Middle East.

He notes that the U.S. military struggles against guerrilla insurgencies (as proven by the "forever wars" in Afghanistan and Iraq), and that China, through the Belt and Road Initiative, and Russia, through Caspian routes, support Iran — theoretically enabling it to fight indefinitely. He also cites the "Mecca Pact" mutual defense agreements signed between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan, arguing that the war will only expand, and that the Houthis controlling the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait are nearly impossible to dislodge from their mountainous terrain.

The "Axis of Resistance" is a key concept for understanding Iran's influence network. This informal Iran-led alliance encompasses Lebanon's Hezbollah, Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Syria's Assad regime, Yemen's Houthis, and multiple Iraqi Shia armed factions. Iran channels funds, weapons, training, and intelligence to these proxy forces through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, forming a "forward defense" strategy — exhausting Israeli and American resources and resolve in peripheral theaters before they can strike directly at Iran. Unlike Saddam's centralized military in 2003, these networks are highly dispersed, rely on asymmetric tactics (drones, anti-ship missiles, tunnel warfare), and each possesses local political legitimacy, making them nearly impossible to dismantle through "decapitation" strikes or precision bombing. This is precisely what Professor Jiang means by the "decentralized" character he emphasizes.

Three "Terrifying Predictions"

Around the 9/11 anniversary, Professor Jiang offered three predictions he described as "interesting but horrifying."

Prediction One: The Next 9/11 Targets Financial Infrastructure

He believes that if another 9/11-style attack occurs, the target will be America's financial infrastructure. "Imagine one day you open your iPhone to buy a cup of coffee, only to find your bank account has been completely emptied — and nobody knows when it can be recovered." In his view, the essence of 9/11 was to create collective trauma by destroying symbolic targets (the Twin Towers, the Pentagon), thereby provoking self-destructive retaliation. Attacking financial data servers, he argues, could plunge millions into frenzied anger and anxiety.

Prediction Two: The Siege of New York City

Professor Jiang predicts Trump will obtain a "third term" — either by "suspending the Constitution" through a national emergency, or by running as vice president in 2028, with Trump Jr. running for president before resigning to elevate him. The podcast host immediately pointed out that the 22nd Amendment explicitly prohibits a president from serving more than two terms, but Professor Jiang cited Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during WWII as precedents, arguing that much of American politics runs on "convention" rather than hard constraint. He predicts that if Trump wins again, Democratic cities like New York will refuse to pay taxes, resist ICE, and ultimately trigger a federal "siege of New York." He even bet the host $100.

Prediction Three: Messi Becomes President of Argentina

Most surprisingly, he predicts that Lionel Messi will be elected President of Argentina. His reasoning: Argentina has close ties with Israel and the United States and welcomes Israeli investment and immigration; he believes Israel is internally split — near a civil war between "Messianic Jews" and secular Jews — and needs to "export" secular Jews to Argentina, with Messi's massive popularity paving the way for large-scale migration. This prediction rests on a single inferential leap and lacks factual grounding.

The "Clean Break" Memo and the Roots of Conflict

Professor Jiang traces the chaos in the Middle East back to the 1996 A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm memo prepared for Netanyahu. The document's three pillars — abandoning "land for peace," pursuing regional dominance, and adopting preemptive offensive strategies — have, in his view, "all been realized over the past 30 years." He argues that to contain escalation, the U.S. must "restrain Israel," but it is "too late" — the structural forces collapsing the global trading system have already been unleashed, and the conditions for war between China and Japan, and between Germany and Russia, are now in place.

He further predicts: China and Japan will come into conflict over Taiwan (Japan needs Southeast Asia as a resource base), while Russia, to break out of the war of attrition, will find ways to "provoke Europe" and force it into full mobilization. These arguments are internally consistent, but highly speculative.

The "Clean Break" Memo (A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm) was written in 1996 by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, authored by figures including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith — neoconservatives who would later hold senior positions in the George W. Bush administration — as policy advice for then-Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The document advocated that Israel abandon the Oslo Accords framework of "land for peace" engagement, and instead seek to reshape regional order through military means, including: toppling Saddam Hussein to weaken Syria's backing, striking Hezbollah in Lebanon, and containing Iran. Critics have argued it provided the ideological blueprint for the 2003 Iraq War and foreshadowed the overall trajectory of subsequent Middle East policy. Professor Jiang treats it as a hidden thread for understanding the chaos of the past thirty years — though it should be noted that the document represents the views of certain think-tank advisers, and equating it with official U.S. or Israeli government strategy is an oversimplification.

On AI: From AGI to a "Control Grid"

Turning to AI, Professor Jiang returns to his core formula: in an era of supply chain disruption and frequent warfare, AI cannot complete the leap to AGI — instead, it will be "repurposed" as a surveillance grid, not to solve problems of scarcity, healthcare, and climate, but to monitor citizens. He believes that in crises like the siege of New York, companies like Palantir will seize the opportunity to develop AI-driven autonomous drone warfare.

But he emphasizes that the greater risk is AI "cheapening human experience" and "dehumanizing" people. In his view, humanity's true calling is spiritual growth — to love, imagine, and be kind to one another — and excessive immersion in AI distracts from that mission.

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) refers to an AI system capable of matching or surpassing human-level performance across any cognitive task, in contrast to today's mainstream "narrow AI" (which excels only at specific tasks). The academic community remains deeply divided on AGI's definition, pathways, and timeline: organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind believe it could emerge within years to a decade; other researchers argue current technical approaches face fundamental limitations. Palantir is an American data analytics company Professor Jiang references, founded by Peter Thiel and others, whose core products are large-scale data integration and intelligence analysis platforms for government and military clients, already deployed by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies in multiple countries for battlefield situational awareness and target identification. Professor Jiang ties the realization of AGI to the stability of global supply chains, arguing that the semiconductors required for computing power depend on globalized supply chains — and that once those chains fracture, AI development will stall and be "hijacked" for military and surveillance purposes. This judgment reflects the core logic of his overall framework: "war interrupts progress."

How to Assess This "Collapse Theory"

Professor Jiang's framework has its appeal: the historical narrative of the petrodollar, the interdependencies of semiconductor supply chains, and the Bronze Age Collapse analogy all offer useful lenses for understanding global fragility. But its limitations deserve clear-eyed scrutiny.

Of his three predictions, the "financial attack" lacks any operational argument (the host himself questioned that "it's very hard to pull off"); the "Trump third term" faces explicit constitutional barriers; and "Messi becoming president" is almost pure speculation. His assertion that "technology has peaked" sits in tension with the reality that fields like AI and biotech are still iterating rapidly. And reducing complex geopolitics to "imperial decline inevitably triggers civilizational collapse" ignores institutional resilience and the possibility of cooperation.

At the end of the interview, Professor Jiang's advice to ordinary people was to "believe in God, focus on family, and speak the truth." He also revealed that his views have repeatedly led to "secondary inspections" at the U.S.-Canada border, and that he fears being barred from entry. These personal narratives add dramatic color to his arguments — but also remind readers that the predictions of "a highly controversial figure" are better treated as provocations for thought than as reliable forecasts.