Japan on Thursday expressed concern about a tense standoff between Iran and the United States over an international nuclear deal and offered to work with Tehran to defuse tension in the Middle East.
"We are concerned that the situation in the Middle East is getting extremely tense," Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at the outset of their meeting in Tokyo.
Zarif traveled to Japan, a key U.S. ally that has maintained amicable ties with the Middle Eastern nation, at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is ramping up pressure on Iran through tighter sanctions and an apparent show of force by leaving the 2015 nuclear accord.