Water Mismanagement, Not Sanctions, Is the Core Crisis

Iran's looming crisis is fundamentally one of domestic mismanagement rather than sanctions: despite having sufficient water resources for an industrial takeoff, poor planning and water-intensive agriculture like pistachios have drained the water table, and since every successful Iranian state over two and a half thousand years managed water well, this failure is emblematic of the extractive state and will cause a real crisis in roughly five to ten years.