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.

Apparently undeterred by the backlash over its last venture into cartoon diplomacy, Israel’s government released an animated video on Tuesday that equates the threat from Islamic State militants to that of a nuclear-armed Iran. The 28-second animation, uploaded to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official accounts on social networks, attempts to erase the distinction between the Sunni Muslim extremists of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and their sworn enemies, the Shiite Muslim clerics who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Diplomat Thomas R. Pickering draws upon his 40 years of experience in the US State Department to give the Bulletin’s Dan Drollette Jr.

At U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s side when he negotiated a framework nuclear deal with Iranian diplomats this spring was physicist Ernest Moniz, U.S. secretary of energy. His presence spoke to the rise of “science diplomacy,” which can take the form of scientists helping diplomats, diplomats helping scientists, or scientific cooperation promoting diplomacy. The Iran case is the most vivid recent example of the first form.

Saudi Arabia’s willingness to wield its oil money on the global diplomatic stage appears to have been laid bare, after the website WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of leaked cables from Riyadh’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. WikiLeaks has not revealed its source, but a group calling itself the "Yemen cyber army" has claimed it hacked government servers.

In one of the most conservative and secretive kingdoms on Earth, the leak of thousands of confidential diplomatic cables has caused shockwaves in Riyadh.