Iranian President: We Must Relocate From Tehran

The historic drought that has gripped Iran for several years requires the Islamic Republic to relocate its capital, according to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. Tehran has ten million inhabitants. How many tens of billions of dollars will it cost the state to move them all? And where will they go?

More on this extraordinary crisis can be found here: “Iran ‘Has No Choice’ but to Move Capital as Water Crisis Deepens, Says President,” by Ailin Vilches Arguello, Algemeiner, November 20, 2025:

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian affirmed on Thursday that the country “has no choice” but to relocate its capital, warning that severe ecological strain has made Tehran impossible to sustain — even as the regime spends billions of dollars rebuilding its military and nuclear infrastructure and backing its terrorist proxies.

In a televised national address, the Iranian leader renewed his call to relocate the capital, asserting that the deepening crisis has “rendered the city uninhabitable.”

Pezeshkian said Iran’s water, land, and infrastructure systems are under such extreme pressure that relocating the capital is now unavoidable, adding that when the move was first proposed, the government lacked even a minimal budget to pursue it.

“The truth is, we have no choice left — relocating the capital is now a necessity,” he said during his speech.

With parts of the city sinking up to 30 centimeters a year and water supplies dwindling, Pezeshkian described Tehran’s current situation as a “catastrophe.”

He urged government ministries and public officials to coordinate their efforts to avert a grim future for the country.

“Protecting the environment is not a game,” the Iranian leader said.

“Ignoring it is signing our own destruction,” he continued, explaining that Tehran can no longer cope with population growth or the city’s expanding construction.

Among the solutions considered to tackle the crisis, one has been importing water from the Gulf of Oman. However, Pezeshkian noted that such an approach is extremely costly, with each cubic meter costing millions to deliver to Tehran….

How long would it take to build enough desalination plants to handle all that water lifted from the Gulf of Oman? How would that water flow from the Gulf of Oman, through a thousand kilometers to Tehran, given that there are at present no pipelines along that route? How long would it take to build the necessary infrastructure capable of carrying enough water to meet the needs of ten million displaced Tehranis?

Chabahar is the city that is mentioned as the likely recipient of ten million Tehranis. It now has fewer than 200,000 people. Who would build, in what time frame, enough housing to accommodate fifty times that number of inhabitants? And what infrastructure beyond housing would a new capital city require, to house government offices, military headquarters, and so much else? President Pezeshkian doesn’t dare to discuss this insurmountable problem.

Over the past few decades, the Iranian government has spent well over $100 billion on its nuclear program. Think only of what it cost to build the vast arrays of thousands of centrifuges used to enrich uranium, that were placed deep underground at Natanz, and deep inside a mountain at Fordow. Those hideously expensive nuclear facilities now lie in ruins — “obliterated,” according to the former head of Mossad, Yossi Cohen — after Israeli and American attacks this past June. More than $100 billion spent on the nuclear program have gone up in smoke.

In addition, Iran has spent tens of billions of dollars on weapons, training, and logistical support for its proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and to prop up the regime of Bashar Assad during the Syrian civil war. Now the IDF has battered Hamas, which has lost close to 30,000 men in Gaza; Hezbollah’s prewar arsenal of 150,000 missiles and rockets has been reduced by 80%; Bashar Assad’s regime has been toppled, and the IDF has systematically reduced all of his Iran-supplied arsenal of weapons to smithereens after he fled to Moscow. In Damascus, the new regime of Ahmed al-Sharaa is implacably opposed to Iran for having supported Assad in the civil war.

The people of Iran, who president has informed them that they will almost certainly have to leave Tehran and relocate to a new capital 1000 kilometers to the southwest, are surely infuriated about the choices that their despotic rulers made over the past several decades. Those rulers spent a hundred billion dollars on their nuclear program, now in ruins, and tens of billions of dollars on Iran’s proxies in the region — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Bashar Assad’s arsenal — that the IDF has now pulverized.

What, they are thinking to themselves, could we have done with all that money if sanity had prevailed? How many desalination plants could have been built with a hundred billion dollars? How many leaky pipelines, all over Iran, now wasting millions of gallons of water, could have been replaced? How much money could have been spent to husband water resources by utilizing the drip irrigation methods perfected by Israeli farmers? How much water could have been produced out of the ambient air if the government had purchased tens of thousands of atmospheric water generator (AWG) machines?

The former French Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France famously said that “to govern is to choose.” The mullahs chose not to spend money on creating and husbanding water resources, but instead to spend it on a nuclear program, now destroyed, and on proxies in the region, now pulverized, both by the IDF. And as ten million people in Tehran are likely going to be forced to pack their bags and move, rage against the regime is surely building all over Iran.