The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Will the Drought in Iran Cause Political Change? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

The drought in Iran is worsening, but this isn't going to spur radical and immediate political change. Let's unpack it.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/will-the-drought-in-iran-cause-political-change

Hey, all, Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado. And today we're talking about the drought in Iran. We had a question come in from our Patreon group about whether or not this could cause a degree of political change in Iran. Short answer is probably not. A little quick backstory. Iran, like most countries in the Middle East, between 1940 and 1985, had a bit of a population boom. And so that population cohort is now in their 40s and have more money to spend. So things like water are something that they have a lot of stretch in their budgets to pay for.

They need to. Second, after the Islamic revolution, a lot of subsidies were thrown out by the new government, which is the current government, the Islamic government, and they tended to be concentrated in the capital. So you had a lot of people move to the capital. So population growth, concentration in the capital is about 10 to 11 million people there now. Based on whose numbers you're using, somewhere between one third and one half of the water that Tehran uses comes from surface water, and the rest is pumped from aquifers. And they've been in a degree of of drought now for 10 years. So the surface water is going away.

The aquifers are not being recharged. And the draw rate has reached a point that it's definitely not sustainable. But keep in mind that we have some version of that problem in the United States, especially in the Mountain West and have for decades. And we're still not to the point that it's really changed behavior because it hasn't reached a critical point yet. If we are going to reach a critical point in Iran, there's no reason to think it's going to be imminent.

The situation is bad. It's getting worse. It's a one-way trip. But saying that it's going to happen next Tuesday or next month or whatever is not something we can do and not just because Iranian data is, let's just call it substandard. And that's before you consider things like corruption. You usually don't see any sort of political shift in a system until the taps actually run dry. And at the moment, we have no reason to expect that to be imminent. In addition, South Africa is probably a really good comparison.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to be in Cape Town. just a few weeks before what they called zero day when they expected the taps to run dry completely. And what the South Africans discovered is that when you have a system that is subsidized, when you have a system that is corrupt, and when you have a system that is drying out, you can change people's behavior pretty quick.

And so in the case of South Africa, you had some farming techniques that were abandoned in favor of things that were more water saving, and popular actions happened with people using less water. We'll probably see the same thing happening in Tehran as well. There's no reason to think this is an immediate crunch. If it does turn into a bigger problem, however, the issue will be on conservation.

They're not going to do anything dramatic like move the capital. Tehran is where it is for a reason. If you move to the north to the casping, you're kind of like in the Iranian equivalent of eastern Kentucky. So let's just say there's a little bit of cultural thing there. Go to the northwest. You're in a near separatist area where the Azerbaijani's are the majority. and if you move south or west, you're not either moving into Arab territory,

deeper mountains, drier mountains, flat out desert, too close to the Persian Gulf, and so being in a place that could be invaded or some combination of all those. Tehran is where it is for a reason, and it is easier and simpler to simply conserve water than to consider any sort of really dramatic shift. So at the moment, this is the sort of thing you'll look at every few weeks just to see if the taps are still running, and unless and until we get to the point that the taps stop, this is probably not something to worry about. And the Iranians are already taking preliminary measures to rain in demand.

They've already cut pressure to most people in the capital, something like 80% of the total, cut the water pressure by over half. So they're moving in the right direction in order to buy themselves more time in the worst case scenario.