Okay. That's a good question.
There's a lot of literature on the intended and unintended consequences of sanctions, the intended ones being to weaken the adversary and, hopefully, change its behaviour. In many cases, the behaviour doesn't change, but at least you weaken it by strangulating it commercially, financially, politically, militarily and so on. That's true, and in the case of Iran, Russia and others, that's an important aspect of it.
There's also huge literature on the unintended consequences of sanctions. One side is the humanitarian side, which was discussed previously. I'll put that one aside. It matters a lot, but it's not my expertise. The other one is on the economic side. What Iran has done over the years is develop tremendous skill at evading sanctions.
By the way, one of the really interesting but poorly understood consequences of this is a sharing of lessons learned among authoritarian states on how to better evade sanctions—for example, Iran and North Korea, and now Russia, since Ukraine. There are a lot of lessons learned being shared between these states on how to evade sanctions. That's a big problem, and I don't know what we can do about it.
What the IRGC has done is build a clandestine economic empire that allows it to control illegal—from our perspective—trade in sanctioned goods with countries in Asia. There is a lot through Dubai. That has made the IRGC extremely rich economically—not only its individual commanders but the organization itself—and therefore much more powerful politically within the country.
To be clear, the rise of the IRGC in Iran is not only because of sanctions. There are other reasons for that. That being said, an unintended consequence of sanctions on Iran undoubtedly has been to strengthen the IRGC. There is a tension here that we haven't fully figured out how to resolve. We want to sanction it—