“How can one help the Iranian people restore their normal life?”
This was the question that a Japanese friend put to me in 2019 in what at the time seemed to be a casual chat in a Persian restaurant in London. Three years later, I have just learned that the question had been something more than a dinner-table note to prolong the conversation. The friend in question had been sounding out a few people about the tactics that then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe should pursue during a visit to Tehran to persuade the ruling mullahs to lead Iran back into “normal life.”
