U.S. policymakers should take a more strategic approach to Iranian sanctions relief and encourage the international business community to pursue commerce in the nation. It is not the United States’ job to rehabilitate the Iranian economy, of course, but clarifying the legal pathways toward Western investment in Iran is an important and necessary task.

The Obama administration quietly brought in a group of Iranian musicians to learn about American folk music. It was a small diplomatic gesture, but one the White House hoped would help ease tensions between the U.S. and Iran, two longtime foes. 

With Iran and world powers close to a nuclear deal, Israel's prime minister has launched a Twitter account in Farsi to reach out to the Iranian public. [...] Netanyahu's office said Monday that the Farsi account will publish content similar to Netanyahu's English and Hebrew accounts to engage directly with the Iranian people.

A group of artists and activists are staging a unique project in the capital, as part of an attempt to show the more positive side of relations between the Jewish state and Tehran. A group of activists and artists in Jerusalem are planning to open their own “Iranian embassy” in the capital next month.

Iran’s public diplomacy has long been geared toward selling a possible deal to hard-liners at home. [...] the government seemed to recognize the need to prove that it had done all it could to obtain a final agreement.

A public diplomacy campaign by the Obama administration to convince world opinion that Iran was reneging on the Lausanne framework agreement in April has seriously misrepresented the actual diplomacy of the Iran nuclear talks.

For more than two thousand years, from circa 550 BC to 1700 AD, Persian high cuisine was as important to the politics of Eurasian states as French gastronomy would become to international diplomacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

As this week’s final nuclear talks got underway, there was one uninvited guest: Maryam Imanieh, the wife of Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. She arrived at Vienna’s Palais Saxe-Coburg Hotel with Hossein Fereydoon, President Hassan Rouhani’s brother, adding a new twist to the final days of negotiations.