NEW: Iran to Abandon Tehran?

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For more than three hundred years, Tehran served as the capital of the Persian empire and its successor nation, Iran. For centuries prior, the city had grown and survived wars and dynastic struggles. Its prominence grew and its importance to Persian public life with it ... until the mullahs seized power in 1979.

In forty-six years, their mismanagement and isolation has transformed a drought into an existential crisis. Today, the Iranian theocracy announced that the government would abandon Tehran and relocate to a proposed site in southeastern Iran:

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Thursday that relocating the country’s capital from Tehran has become unavoidable due to overcrowding and water shortages.
Pezeshkian told a meeting in Qazvin that Tehran cannot sustain more construction or population growth and that… pic.twitter.com/fHSSbpZCbZ
— Iran International English (@IranIntl_En) November 20, 2025

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Thursday that the country's capital should be relocated away from Tehran because of overcrowding and a deepening water crisis.
Pezeshkian has raised the idea of moving away from Tehran before, with rainfall in the capital this year at its lowest level for a century.
'The reality is that we have no choice. It (the relocation) is a necessity. We cannot overwhelm this region with more population and construction,' he said, according to the official IRNA news agency.
'We can develop, but we cannot solve its water problem.'
The Iranian president warned earlier this month the current capital could be evacuated without rainfall before winter, though he did not elaborate.

Earlier in the year, the government had floated the idea, only to claim later that the trial balloon was intended only to underscore the seriousness of the water crisis. When Pezeshkian again raised the possibility a few weeks ago, the idea was laughed off as a joke. No one is joking now, however. Iranian authorities have imposed strict-unto-draconian water restrictions in the Tehran area, but with 10 million-plus residents, those measures have failed to address the failure of the mullahs to keep up with the demands of its key urban center.

The relocation of the capital doesn't necessarily mean the relocation of ten million people, but it certainly will require some level of mass relocation. That creates all sorts of danger to the regime, where the people of Tehran have already been restive for years and unhappy with the regime's theocratic tyranny. The disruption to civic life in its current capital will be on such a scale as to defy any attempt to control it, and will stretch the IRGC to a breaking point in attempting to suppress dissent while simultaneously shifting its own assets to the new capital for the effort needed for a build-out.

Given that all of the disruption and chaos results from the mullahs' refusal to invest in Iranian infrastructure and redirect its resources to terrorism abroad and oppression at home, the prospects of this shift cannot help but be existential for the regime. The regime has blamed this current crisis on Israel and damage from the war, but that was a war that the mullahs not only fomented but also chose to enter directly. And as the BBC noted earlier this month, the water crisis not only goes much farther than Tehran but also long precedes the war:

The head of Iran's National Centre for Climate and Drought Crisis Management, Ahmad Vazifeh, has warned that, apart from Tehran, dams in many other provinces — including West Azerbaijan, East Azerbaijan and Markazi — are also in a "worrying state", with water levels in the single-digit percentages.
In Mashhad, Iran's second-largest city, officials are sounding the alarm as well.
The Governor of Khorasan Razavi Province in north-east Iran, said the water reserves in Mashhad's dams have dropped to "less than eight percent," warning that the province faces a "mega-challenge of drought." ...
Even Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly acknowledged the looming threat — speaking about water shortages in his Nowruz addresses in 2011 and on other occasions in the following years.
Yet little has changed.

The New York Times provided the real reasons behind the water crisis earlier this month as well. It didn't start with a single drought, and it won't be solved with the mullahs sinking more money into its proxy armies either:

Iran’s water problems go beyond low precipitation levels. Studies show that decades of mismanagement, including excessive dam construction, illegal well drilling and unsustainable agriculture, have contributed to the depletion of water reserves. Climate change and rising temperatures have exacerbated the crisis.
Excessive groundwater extraction in Tehran has caused the ground to sink at an alarming rate of 300 millimeters per year — around 60 times as high as what is regarded as the critical threshold of stability and safety of infrastructure. ...
Experts say the solution lies in modernizing water consumption practices in the agriculture sector — and coordinating between governmental agencies working at cross-purposes.

Experts should look instead to the decades of malevolent incompetence that created this crisis. If Iran's mullahs had just decided to focus on investing in Iran rather than regional hegemony, they would have already created the necessary infrastructure for a modern state and its capital's population. Instead, they dissipated tens of billions of dollars on terrorism and a nuclear-weapons program that just got destroyed because of the mullahs' imperial and theocratic ambitions.

On top of those strategic decisions, the regime operates on the principles of fealty and punishment of heresy rather than the promotion of competence and accomplishment. That is a common feature of all tyrannical regimes, theocratic or not, and the result is the kind of incompetence in all aspects that this crisis has exposed. For that matter, that same incompetence got exposed in the Twelve-Day War, when it took Israel only a few hours to impose air superiority over Tehran and almost the entirety of Iran.

Tyrannical regimes generally don't survive for long when their incompetence becomes this clear to its population. Any attempt to relocate the capital will not just confirm that failure, but the chaos that this relocation will create will almost certainly provide a catalyst for a popular uprising that could and likely will spell the end of the mullahs' reign. That's especially true considering the implications of a drought crisis for a regime supposedly based on divine authority.

Think about that for a moment. You can bet that Iranians are already considering that as the mullahs keep asking for prayer to get rain. The storm is coming, one way or the other.

I spoke with Dr. Ramesh Sepehrrad last week about this crisis and others that the regime now faces in Iran. Dr. Sepehrrad spoke at the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) Free Iran convention this past weekend, which we preview in this interview.

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