Shinzo Abe and Hassan Rouhani delight Davos

One of the roles of the World Economic Forum is to serve as a mini UN General Assembly – allowing world leaders to give speeches, stage meetings and schmooze the media.

The two leaders to generate the most interest in Davos this year were President Hassan Rouhani of Iran and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan. Partly, this is to do with novelty. Mr Rouhani only took office in August. Mr Abe has been in power for little more than a year.

The Davos crowd is also keenly aware that the two leaders are potentially transformative figures. Mr Rouhani has become the public face of Iran’s efforts to achieve a rapprochement with the US, and end dangerous tensions over the Iranian nuclear programme. Mr Abe’s bold programme of economic reforms could revitalise Japan, the world’s third-largest economy.

The Iranian and Japanese leaders are also central to the two most dangerous regional rivalries in the world: the tensions between China and Japan, and between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Both Mr Abe and Mr Rouhani succeeded in coming across as a new sort of national leader.

The world has come to expect that Japanese prime ministers, with few exceptions, are stiff and formal in manner. But in his speech to the forum, Mr Abe spoke about economic reform with a passion and energy that even his western counterparts struggle to muster.

He is also strikingly informal in smaller settings. In contast to the quasi-imperial style of China’s President Xi Jinping. Mr Abe is much more low key. He bustled into the room for a press briefing without fuss or protocol. Asked if he was prepared to switch from “off-the-record” to “on-the record”, he agreed without hesitation. (Unlike Mr Rouhani, who gave a similar briefing the following day.)

Mr Abe’s remarks at the press briefing also caused waves. In response to a question from me about the possibility of a war between China and Japan, the prime minister compared the tensions between these two nations with the situation between Germany and Britain before the first world war.

These remarks were not as bellicose as they sound. His tone was discursive and he made it clear that a war would be a tragedy for all sides. Nonetheless, it was a startling comparison to hear from a world leader.

Mr Abe also took tough and emotional questions from Chinese and South Korean journalists about his controversial views on Japan’s imperial past. Although his efforts to explain his recent visit to the Yasukuni shrine, which commemorates the war dead including some classed as war criminals, failed to convince his questioners, his willingness to engage was still impressive.

Despite those controversies, Mr Abe can probably count this year’s WEF as a success. He came intending to convince the Davos crowd that Japan is changing under new and dynamic leadership – and he largely succeeded in that goal.

Mr Rouhani also had a good Davos. By putting his ambitions for rapid economic growth at the centre of his speech, the Iranian president chose a language and a goal that the Davos crowd could relate to. There was palpable relief that this was not an angry Iranian leader, banging on about the “Great Satan” or the “Zionist entity”.

Instead Mr Rouhani presented an emollient and smiling face and stressed his desire to meet the expectations of young Iranians for a better life. It should also be noted that, on the substance of politics, Mr Rouhani said very little that is new.

He insisted that the main problem in Syria is the “ruthless terrorists” flooding into the country, rather than the brutality of the Assad regime. On the other hand, he made very little fuss about the fact that Iran has been excluded from the Syria peace talks that are taking place on the other side of Switzerland, in Geneva.

On the all-important nuclear issue, the Iranian president argued that the key change is that, after a decade, the world has finally accepted the legitimacy of Iran’s nuclear programme. The irate Saudis and Israelis would probably agree with that. However, Mr Rouhani also continues to insist that Iran’s nuclear programme is entirely peaceful in nature.

Very few outside observers would accept that – given the nature of the programme and the fact that Iran has huge supplies of both oil and natural gas. But the Davos crowd – desperate for good news from the Middle East – was prepared to overlook that problem.