Meeting of two dictators, Ali Khamenei and Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania

Let us, for a moment, step into a speculative past, perhaps a cold, gray day in Bucharest during the mid-1980s, envisioning a clandestine rendezvous of two profoundly different, yet disturbingly similar, autocratic minds, drawn together by shared anxieties and a mutual distrust of the liberal West. The air would be thick with unspoken tension, a peculiar blend of suspicion and a perverse sense of camaraderie between leaders who wielded absolute power over their nations, albeit under vastly divergent ideological banners.