BNC#9 | Dr Iraj Abedian: SA's 80-year bond with Iran, and why America's Middle East era is ending

Reza Shah of Iran died in exile in a house in Johannesburg in 1944. Eighty-two years later, an Iranian-born South African economist stood up at BNC#9 to explain why that strange, half-forgotten history still shapes how Pretoria thinks about Tehran, and why the war now raging between Iran, Israel and the United States might be the moment historians look back on as the start of America's retreat from the Middle East. Dr Iraj Abedian takes you from a British-orchestrated abdication and a CIA-backed coup, through Sasol's Iranian shareholder and Mandela's visits to Tehran, to a chessboard being redrawn "literally hourly." His verdict on Washington's war plan: a swamp, not a surrender.