Among examples used to demonstrate the law of unintended consequences is the possibly apocryphal ‘cobra effect’. British colonial administrators in Delhi once offered a bounty for dead cobras to control the city’s snake population. Enterprising Indians immediately started breeding cobras. When the British cottoned on and cancelled the bounty, the breeders released the snakes, resulting in even more cobras.

Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war with Iran may be having a similarly unwanted effect, only with a more dangerous cobra. Rather than removing a cornered regime, they have helped to strengthen it, elevating the influence of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) at the expense of both the Supreme Leader and his top mullahs.

‘The distinction between the IRGC and the state has become increasingly blurred,’ says Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute. ‘The Guards are no longer merely an institution benefiting from the state; in many respects, they have become an integral part of it.’ Ray Takeyh, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, considers the Guards ‘a state unto themselves’. While they still require some clerical cover and sanction for their brutality, the power balance has tilted in their favour.

It has a mafia-like control over the economy and increasingly determines parameters for US negotiations

It has a mafia-like control over the economy and increasingly determines parameters for US negotiations

If one institution in Iran has profited from the wars of 2025 and today, it is the IRGC. After two decades of taking control of Iran’s overstaffed, mismanaged and corrupt state-owned enterprises, it now has a mafia-like control over the........

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