Iran’s January protests were the predictable result of years of ignored economic and social warning signs, according to one of the country’s most prominent economists, who says the state failed to recognize how close society had come to the brink.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hastily advanced trip to Washington this week underscores the rising stakes surrounding renewed diplomacy between Iran and the United States.

Bulldozers moved piles of bodies of those killed in the Gohardasht district of Karaj during the January crackdown on nationwide protests, in what witnesses describe as a deliberate attempt to instill fear after corpses were stacked in public squares.

The killings that swept Iran last month revived memories of 1988, when the Islamic Republic erased thousands of political prisoners in silence—my brother, Bijan, among them.

Tehran’s frequently invoked threat of closing the Strait of Hormuz may be far easier to signal than to carry out, not least because it would harm allied China more than the hostile West.