Set aside: this claim can't be checked against events, so it is not scored.
P065
European rearmament is really about American weapons sales shakedown, not fighting Russia
What Jiang said
“Remember the military-industrial complex, right? The entire point is not to fight the Russians. The Russians are just a pretext, an excuse. The real purpose is to get the Europeans to buy expensive American weapons. It's really a shakedown, okay?”
Analysis
'The real purpose is get the Europeans to buy expensive American weapons. It's really a shakedown.'
Status history
- 2026-05-22 · Imported into the tracker as Pending (bulk import — the status it already had, not the date it was decided)
-
2026-09-25 ·
Pending → Unverifiable
(manual)
Not a forecast (claim audit 2026-09-26, operator-approved): in the 2025-06-12 lecture Jiang described something already true or under way. He states in present tense that the purpose of rearmament 'is' to get Europeans to buy weapons and 'it's really a shakedown', describing a current state of affairs rather than predicting a future development.