Distilled interview

Grand Strategy Or Pawnhood

Exclusive Interview with Professor Jiang by Dr James Cheong 江学勤独家专访详细分析美国伊朗日本全世界

A university lecture becomes a warning to China: tactics, utility, and clever people are not enough. A country without a theory of the world is not a player in history. It is the pawn of those who have one.

The lecture opposes Sunzi and Three Kingdoms China to Thucydides. Chinese strategy, in Jiang’s telling, likes utility, stratagem, and genius; the West studies character, speeches, and structural force. That difference matters because Iran, Japan, Russia, America, the Gulf, and China are not moving through isolated events. They are being pulled by grand strategy. Iran turns sacrifice into speech. America attacks Iran to split the Heartland. Japan uses energy fear to remilitarize. America retreats from dollar-finance empire into resource empire. China, lacking a world theory, risks turtling up while others make the map.

Core thesis

The lecture opposes Sunzi and Three Kingdoms China to Thucydides. Chinese strategy, in Jiang’s telling, likes utility, stratagem, and genius; the West studies character, speeches, and structural force. That difference matters because Iran, Japan, Russia, America, the Gulf, and China are not moving through isolated events. They are being pulled by grand strategy. Iran turns sacrifice into speech. America attacks Iran to split the Heartland. Japan uses energy fear to remilitarize. America retreats from dollar-finance empire into resource empire. China, lacking a world theory, risks turtling up while others make the map.

Core Reading

The most important sentence comes near the end of the formal lecture: without grand strategy, without a theory of the world, you will be used by those who do. Everything before it builds that claim. Thucydides teaches Jiang to look past interests and clever tactics into the personality of states , the speeches that coordinate them, and the structural forces that move them like ocean waves. Sunzi and Three Kingdoms teach useful tactics, but tactics are fragile when the other side does not share the same culture. China’s danger is not merely that it lacks ships, oil, or friends. Its danger is that it may not know what game it is in .

03:01-10:30

Thucydides Against Sunzi

The lecture starts by separating Chinese and Western geopolitical habits: utility versus character, stratagem versus speech, genius versus structure.

The event is formally a university lecture about twenty-first-century Sunzi and Thucydides. Jiang begins with three differences. Chinese geopolitical imagination tends toward utility: power grows from the barrel of a gun, and the cat matters only if it catches mice. Thucydides says this is incomplete. States are not only interest machines. They have character, personality, psychology, and mood.

The second difference is stranger and more useful: China remembers stratagems, the West remembers speeches. A stratagem works best when everyone shares the same cultural code. A speech does something different. It reveals the people to themselves, tells them why they are fighting , and coordinates their emotions into action.

The third difference rejects the great-man comfort of Chinese history. Zhuge Liang, Cao Cao, and Sima Yi can be brilliant; the wave still arrives . Thucydides watches structural force: Sparta fears rising Athens, and war becomes hard to avoid. In this lecture, that method is the bridge from ancient Greece to Iran.

10:30-21:45

Iran As Speech And Heartland

Iran is read first through faith and sacrifice, then through Mackinder: America attacks to prevent a Russia-Iran Heartland connection.

From a utility perspective, Jiang says the U.S. attack on Iran makes no sense. Iran offered Trump a deal, and a rational bargain was available. The missing piece is personality and faith. Iran can resist because the first act of the war, in Jiang’s account, is the supreme leader refusing sanctuary and turning his own death into a speech without words: this is my home, and I will defend it.

The second explanation is not Trump. It is the Heartland. Anglo-American empire is naval; it cannot let a land power unify Eurasia. If Russia wins in Ukraine and then joins Iran, the Eurasian continent begins to close against sea-power control. Iran must be attacked because Iran is where the Heartland can be split.

Dugin enters as the Russian who understands the Thucydidean world better than most analysts: not conquest by spreadsheet, but grand strategy as positioning inside historical force . Western Faustian societies expand through individualism and materialism, then rot into decadence. Russia offers an Orthodox, collectivist, spiritual alternative and looks for partners such as Iran, India, Japan, and smaller states that share enough of that mood.

21:45-28:03

China Without A World Theory

The lecture’s China warning is not Taiwan first. It is overfishing, water, export dependence, and the absence of grand strategy.

The Iran war is terrible for China because China depends on global stability, imported resources, and exports. Jiang does not think Taiwan is the main short-term flashpoint. The more immediate danger is uglier and smaller: Chinese fishermen overfishing the South China Sea until neighbors begin arrests and Beijing has to decide whether to escalate.

The long-term danger is water. Southeast Asian rivers flow down from the Tibetan Plateau. The map looks quiet until the resource becomes scarce; then geography becomes conflict. But geography is still not destiny by itself. Grand strategy is the answer to geography’s limits.

That is the lecture’s hardest accusation against Chinese policymakers: too much economics, material, weapon systems, and raw power; too little attention to ideas. Ideas coordinate a population. Ideas give action its direction. Without them, a state can be wealthy and still be moved by someone else’s theory of the world .

28:03-40:12

The Middle East Machine

The Q&A pushes the lecture into Iran, Israel, GCC elites, secret societies, AI control, and Christian Zionism.

Asked why Iran avoids Jerusalem, Jiang rejects the symbolic target frame. Iran should not waste scarce weapons on high-drama, low-reward targets. It should hit the weak links that force the United States into ground war: the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf order around them. Iran’s strategic goal is to pull America onto the ground , where America can be beaten.

The most explosive reversal is that Israel and Iran are not simply enemies in the strategic structure. Israel, in Jiang’s reading, wants America and Iran to exhaust each other so Israel becomes the top regional actor. Iran wants America destroyed on land. Their intentions differ, but both paths can break the American empire.

The secret-society answers are less about omnipotent puppet masters than about pattern readers trying to preserve power through change. The fake Albert Pike world-war letter is dismissed; the real question is control. Jiang says the elite project is order against agency , diversity, and conflict, and AI makes sense not because it makes money but because it can become a surveillance grid after chaos.

Religion remains the old technology. The powerful may care only about preserving influence, but followers need a story. Christian Zionists matter because they can sincerely believe that war ushers in the Messiah or the return of Jesus. The manipulator does not have to believe the story; the follower does.

40:12-52:29

Japan And The Resource Turn

Energy chokepoints carry the Middle East war into East Asia, where Japan remilitarizes and America profits from selling resources to both sides.

The host asks what happens if Hormuz and the Red Sea are closed. Jiang answers with Japan’s oil clock . Even if the Houthis do not literally close every lane, they can hit Saudi and GCC infrastructure. Japan, the most industrial East Asian economy, has months of reserves and will need to act. The likely path is remilitarization, naval deployment, and coalition participation.

China and Japan do not face the sea the same way. China is a land army that can retreat behind borders. Japan is a naval power for whom sea control is life and death. Jiang even says that in a pure maritime battle without aircraft, Japan could beat the United States. The point is not naval trivia. It is that Japan has motive and doctrine to use the Middle East war as cover for a new posture.

North Korea, meanwhile, does not need a full war to profit. It can threaten Seoul or Japan, lean on its Russia pact, and demand bribes not to make trouble while everyone is distracted by Iran. The Philippines would not be isolated either; Jiang imagines it as one part of a wider Southeast Asian alignment against China.

America’s role changes. If it loses the Middle East and GCC petrodollar recycling, it must move from finance empire to resource empire: retreat into the Western Hemisphere, then sell oil, rare earths, agriculture, and weapons to East Asia. In that frame, America can enjoy China-Japan conflict because it supplies both sides.

This is why Jiang refuses the easy China-replaces-America story. Belt and Road is trade on top of Pax Americana, not a strategy for world order after Pax Americana breaks. When global conflict makes trade impossible, China’s old move is not world conquest. It is to turtle up , close the borders, and protect the inside.

52:29-60:45

Greater Israel, American Civil War

The final answers join Greater Israel, North American coercion, and U.S. elite civil war between Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Asked what grand policy Jiang would recommend for China, he refuses the premise. A grand strategy requires friends, alliances, and a theory of the world. China, in his reading, does not care enough about the world to build one. The issue is not that he lacks advice; it is that the political will to use such advice is missing .

On Greater Israel, the answer is not quick victory. Jiang expects a dragging equilibrium : U.S. ground troops, destroyed GCC economies, no resolution, and rising discontent inside America. If America recognizes it is losing in the Middle East, it shifts force toward North America : Cuba, Canada, Mexico, the security perimeter.

Greater Israel appears when America leaves but its machinery remains. Israel absorbs CENTCOM ’s equipment, personnel, and apparatus; GCC states are wrecked; Iran is crippled. This is imperial succession by infrastructure, not just a biblical map.

The last answer turns inward. America is already in civil war, Jiang says, but not in the simple partisan sense. Wall Street and the financialized economy have ruled since Clinton and Obama. Trump represents counter-elites around Silicon Valley and AI. The private-credit bubble and AI bubble are rival claims on the state’s bailout power.

Wars help the counter-elite because they weaken the military-industrial complex and the financial sector. Then the old money strikes back, and militias or other groups fight in the streets. That is the closing lens: Iran, Venezuela, China, North America, AI, finance, and war all become legible as a struggle over which elite gets to command the state .

Questions

Why is Iran not striking Jerusalem, and is it avoiding a false-flag escalation?

Jiang says Iran is acting strategically by conserving limited weapons and pressuring the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and other GCC weak points to force America into ground war, where Iran believes America can be defeated.

If Hormuz and the Red Sea are closed, what will Japan do?

Jiang says Japan faces an oil clock and will likely remilitarize, join a coalition, and send naval force toward the Middle East after first trying to buy or bargain around the disruption.

Could Japan’s remilitarization quickly create conflict with China?

Jiang says Japan wants the Middle East war as an excuse to remilitarize, but Japan can buy oil from Russia and America. The deeper issue is doctrine: Japan is a naval power, while China is land-focused and has limited ways to stop Japanese maritime assertiveness.

Can China and America reconcile, or are they locked into a fight?

Jiang says America’s post-Middle-East strategy may make China and America commercially compatible: America retreats into resources and sells oil, rare earths, agriculture, and weapons while Japan-China and China-Southeast Asia conflicts become the real friction.

Can China replace America as world leader or form a G2 order?

Jiang says no: China historically has not tried to organize the world, Belt and Road depends on Pax Americana, and when global conflict blocks trade China is more likely to retreat inward than send military power overseas.

What grand policy would be best for China?

Jiang refuses the premise because he thinks China does not care about the world, does not build real alliances, and therefore lacks the appetite required for grand strategy.

Will Greater Israel appear in the next two years, and will Iran and the Gulf states survive?

Jiang predicts a dragging war equilibrium rather than a clean end: U.S. ground troops, wrecked GCC economies, American unrest, and eventually Israel absorbing U.S. CENTCOM apparatus as America leaves the Middle East.

Could U.S. domestic chaos become severe enough to divide the country?

Jiang says America is already in civil war between Wall Street finance and Silicon Valley AI counter-elites. The conflict becomes visible when financial elites strike back and militias or street groups fight over which elite commands the state.

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