Is Trump Trying to Lose the Iran War on Purpose? The Professor Jiang Theory Exploding Online
A viral theory from Professor Jiang argues that Washington may be stumbling into — or even tolerating — a strategic loss because a prolonged Hormuz crisis makes the world more dependent on North American energy. It sounds wild. It also touches real pressure points.
Is Trump Trying to Lose the Iran War on Purpose? The Professor Jiang Theory Exploding Online
Every major war eventually produces a theory that sounds too cynical to be true and too structurally neat to dismiss.
The current version comes from Professor Jiang’s viral commentary: perhaps Washington is not simply failing to end the Iran war cleanly. Perhaps the chaos itself is useful. If the Strait of Hormuz stays restricted and the war drags on, Europe, Japan, China and others become more dependent on North America for oil, gas and other rerouted supplies. In that telling, “losing” the war militarily could still help the United States financially or geopolitically.
It is an argument built for virality because it fuses three ideas people already half-believe: that U.S. elites profit from disorder, that energy dependence shapes everything, and that official war aims often diverge from war outcomes.
The first thing to say is that Reuters has not reported that Trump is intentionally trying to lose the war. That claim is an interpretation, not a documented strategy memo. But the theory draws energy from real facts, and that is why it deserves analysis rather than mockery.
Start with what Reuters has established.
Reuters has shown again and again that the war and the Hormuz disruption are producing far more than an oil shock. Fertilizer supply is under pressure. Reuters reported in early March that farmers were already facing soaring fertilizer and fuel costs because the war had closed Hormuz and disrupted regional fertilizer plants just as planting season approached. Reuters also reported that tight helium supply caused by the conflict had begun to hit tech supply chains. And Reuters reported that South Korean officials were worried about disruptions to key semiconductor manufacturing materials.
So Jiang’s broader framing — that the war is not just about oil, but about food systems and advanced industry — is not fantasy. That part is real.
The second pillar of the theory is also grounded in reality, though not in the conspiratorial way viral posts often present it. Reuters has reported repeatedly that countries hit by Hormuz disruption are looking for alternatives and that the United States has become more important as a swing supplier. U.S. LNG exports have hit record highs as Middle East supply is disrupted. Europe, already heavily reliant on U.S. LNG, is even more exposed. North American energy producers do, in a market sense, gain leverage when Gulf supplies become unstable.
But leverage is not the same as deliberate design.
This is where the theory becomes slippery. To say “North America benefits from higher dependency” is a market observation. To say “therefore Washington intentionally wants to lose the war” is a leap. States often gain from second-order consequences they did not design. The existence of an incentive does not prove the existence of a plan.
And there are obvious costs that make the theory less tidy than its fans suggest. A prolonged war drives inflation, rattles U.S. politics, complicates relations with allies, strains the military, and risks a larger regional eruption. Even if some exporters and energy-linked interests benefit, the United States as a political system does not simply bank clean upside from disorder. Reuters has reported that Trump’s own advisers worry about gasoline prices and the domestic cost of escalation. That hardly sounds like a government enjoying frictionless strategic profit.
Still, Jiang’s theory bites because it captures something true about modern empire: systems can profit from outcomes that look like failure.
The U.S. military does not have to win elegantly for U.S.-based suppliers, financial instruments, insurers, producers and strategic industries to gain relative advantage from global disruption. That is not a hidden conspiracy so much as a feature of centrality. When the world breaks, some nodes become more indispensable.
The more unsettling part of Jiang’s argument is the moral one. If the system rewards prolonged instability, then the political threshold for ending the war cleanly can rise. Not because someone explicitly wants famine or semiconductor shortages, but because the pain is unequally distributed. Importers, poorer countries and manufacturing-heavy economies absorb far more of the shock than the U.S. shale basin does.
That is where the fertilizer and chip angles matter. They make the war less like a regional contest and more like a slow global re-pricing of dependence. Food insecurity, electronics bottlenecks, industrial chemicals, helium, shipping insurance and inflation all become part of one chain.
Jiang’s harshest claim — that the U.S. is a corrupt oligarchic structure willing to let catastrophe run if elites are protected — goes beyond what Reuters or any hard reporting here establishes. That belongs to polemic, not proof. But his diagnosis resonates because many people sense that policy systems are judged less by total harm than by who bears it.
So is Trump trying to lose the war on purpose? There is no hard evidence for that. But is the war producing conditions that can deepen North America’s relative leverage even while causing enormous destruction elsewhere? yes. Reuters reporting already supports that uncomfortable possibility.
The most useful way to read Jiang is not as a prophet of secret intent, but as a critic of structural outcome. His theory is strongest not when it alleges a hidden master plan, but when it asks a more corrosive question: what if a war can be strategically “bad” in public and still economically useful to the core of the system running it?
That question is harder to dismiss.
And it is one reason these posts keep spreading.