CNN reported this week that the CIA is arming Iranian Kurdish forces to destabilize Iran further. The White House called it “completely false” while confirming that Trump had spoken to Kurdish leaders — an intentional contradiction.
A former military intelligence specialist told AFP the goal is for Kurdish forces to trigger a “cascading effect” of ethnic violence that overwhelms the Iranian state and multiplies civilian suffering. At the same time, Trump is backing Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah toppled in 1979, as the presumptive ruler — dependent on American aid to suppress the very ethnic divisions Washington is stoking. Pahlavi commands no army and holds no domestic base or democratic mandate. He is a vessel, useful for signing whatever contracts keep him nominally in power.
It’s already starting. When five Iranian Kurdish groups announced a coalition for self-determination, Pahlavi attacked the idea outright, calling territorial integrity “the ultimate red line.”
So Trump arms the very people his chosen ruler calls an existential threat. The contradiction isn’t a blunder — it is the method. Colonial administrators perfected it: arm your subjects against one another, set them to degrading work, and carry off everything beneath their feet while they fight.
My own graduate research on disinformation and the origins of special operations, at the London School of Economics, documented this pattern in the British occupation of Ethiopia.
An intervention sold as “establishing stability” produced revolution and territorial war, then decades of anti-Western blowback the Horn of Africa has never escaped. Iran is being set up to follow.
The Method Has a Name
Mahmood Mamdani at Columbia published Define and Rule in 2012, documenting a system British administrators built after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. They sorted populations into ethnic categories, wrote those categories into law, and then governed through the divisions they had manufactured.
In Sudan, after crushing the Mahdiyya — a revolutionary movement that had united populations across tribal lines — the British carved Darfur into tribal homelands called “dars.” Land and governance rights became exclusive to whoever was classified as native to a given dar. A society of fluid, overlapping identities hardened into a set of legally enforced ethnic containers.
The Mahdiyya was a translocal anti-colonial resistance which “shook the foundations of the Empire to the core.” After it was brutally defeated, Darfurian society was effectively tribalized.
Darfur today is a byword for permanent war, fueled by foreign extraction.
The trick was never simply to divide and rule. Define and rule does the work on its own. You don’t need pre-existing hatreds — you build the administrative categories that make ethnicity the only identity with political weight. After that, ethnic conflict stops being a risk and becomes the architecture, and the architecture is the instrument of control.
Trump’s Iran strategy runs on the same Darfur logic. Arm the Kurds as Kurds, activate Baluchi militants as Baluchis, court Pahlavi as the Persian restorationist. Each faction is handed a role that contradicts the others, so national cooperation becomes impossible and self-destruction becomes the path of least resistance.
Follow the Oil
Philippe Le Billon at UBC has spent two decades mapping how resource geography shapes armed conflict. Point-source resources like oil, concentrated in fixed locations, produce a particular kind of war: control of the production site becomes the whole objective, and the people living on top of it become either recruits or obstacles to be cleared.
Iran’s resource geography is a textbook case.
Khuzestan province generates roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil revenue, and its population is predominantly Arab. The International Crisis Group documented in 2023 that Khuzestan’s Arab minority reads the central government’s chronic underinvestment as systematic discrimination, not mere mismanagement. The New Lines Institute confirmed in February 2026 that local Arabs are shut out of work in the oil and petrochemical industries, with those jobs reserved for ethnic Persians who are paid to resettle on confiscated Arab farmland. As a Khuzestani activist told the ICG:
We live on one of the wealthiest lands on earth.
The same pattern repeats around the map: Baluchis hold the southeast astride the corridor to the Indian Ocean; Kurds the northwest, on the pipeline routes and crossings into Iraq; Azeris the north, against the Azerbaijan frontier.
Fragment Iran along those lines and the result is a cage match — a dozen competing statelets, each parked on resources none of them has the sovereign standing to bargain over collectively.
Chaos is the Extraction Discount Trick
Michael Ross at UCLA worked through data from 170 countries in The Oil Curse and found petroleum-rich states are 50 percent more likely to be run by autocrats and twice as likely to fall into civil war. Oil concentrates power and eliminates the need to tax anyone, which strips away the last incentive for accountability. The petro-state becomes a rentier state, authoritarian by structural necessity.
What is being done to Iran is worse than the oil curse running its natural course. This is the curse engineered from the outside. Pick the autocrat first — Pahlavi — then manufacture the ethnic fragmentation that makes his consolidation look like the only thing standing between Iran and collapse. The trap is the goal.
Paul Collier at Oxford coined the term “conflict trap”: civil war, low income, and dependence on primary commodity exports lock into a self-reinforcing cycle. Once a resource-rich country breaks, it tends to stay broken. The resources keep flowing out at a discount, because armed factions need weapons more than they need fair market value.
That is the business model, and it fits the Trump brand of smash-and-grab exactly.
Congo holds more cobalt than anywhere on earth and has been at war continuously since the 1990s. Jason Stearns, who led the UN investigation into the violence, documented in Dancing in the Glory of Monsters how its politics kept producing leaders without vision, all of them sustained by mineral extraction that financed every side at once. 5.4 million dead. The minerals kept flowing.
Sudan fractured, and the oil fields became the contested border. Libya came apart, and the concessions were carved up among militias. Venezuela got the same treatment from the same administration: destabilize, sanction, prop up an exile figurehead, and build the entire intervention around energy concessions.
Yugoslavia Isn’t Forgotten
Susan Woodward — senior advisor to the top UN official in the former Yugoslavia, special representative of the Secretary-General — wrote in Balkan Tragedy:
To explain the Yugoslav crisis as a result of ethnic hatred is to turn the story upside down and begin at its end.
The real cause was the disintegration of governmental authority. Outside powers recognized breakaway republics, armed chosen factions, and imposed economic conditions that accelerated the collapse — then labeled the resulting violence “ancient ethnic hatreds.”
The hatreds were the output, not the input, produced by political and economic collapse rather than the cause of it. And Western intervention, Woodward showed, made it worse.
Iran maps onto this with uncomfortable precision: a multi-ethnic state with geographically concentrated populations, ground down by sanctions, with outside powers arming particular ethnic factions while professing support for its territorial integrity, fronted by a diaspora figurehead who has foreign backing and nothing at home.
Pahlavi is Tudjman. The Kurdish coalition is the Croatian Defense Council. The “cascading effect” the administration’s own analysts describe is exactly what Woodward spent 556 pages documenting: how a multi-ethnic state dissolves into ethnic war once outside powers start picking favorites.
In Yugoslavia, that cascading effect produced Srebrenica.
Name It
Francesco Caselli and Wilbur John Coleman formalized the economics in their NBER paper “On the Theory of Ethnic Conflict“: the probability of ethnic conflict rises with the share of a country’s wealth that is expropriable. Oil is inherently expropriable. Ethnic boundaries become the enforcement mechanism — they lower the cost of working out who belongs in the winning coalition and who does not.
Ethnicity makes resource expropriation cheaper. That is why resource wars track ethnic lines so reliably.
Berman, Couttenier, and Girard confirmed in The Economic Journal (2023) that mineral extraction sharpens ethnic identity at the expense of national identity. Mining does not build a nation. It manufactures grievance, by making ethnicity the line that decides who benefits and who is left out.
The administration is installing an unelected exile to keep extraction running on favorable terms. To shield him from any real contest for power, it is engineering ethnic conflict across a country of 90 million people sitting on the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves — priming the minorities concentrated on top of those reserves to kill one another.
There are exact words for what this is. Deliberately triggering ethnic violence to deny a people political representation has a legal name. So does engineering a state’s collapse in order to extract its resources at gunpoint prices. The scholarship is not short on vocabulary.
And a broken Iran becomes its own justification — proof, after the fact, that the region was never capable of governing itself. The collapse is engineered precisely so it can later be cited as evidence, the same closed loop that let apartheid manufacture the dysfunction it then pointed to as the reason for control.
Will anyone say the word out loud — genocide — before the next “cascading effect” runs to the conclusion we already know?
