Online Lecture Teaches You Everything You Need to Know About Iran

Online Lecture Teaches You Everything You Need to Know About Iran:

Can you really learn everything you need to know about topics ranging from healthcare to global affairs in five-minute online videos? That’s the promise of a new series from 92Y’s Campaign for the American Conversationand the Harvard Kennedy School.

The plan: Produce a series of online lectures from some of the sharpest minds in politics and economics. The goal: Make those lectures incredibly accessible to those with absolutely no prior knowledge of the subject.

In the first of the series, posted above, former U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns gives the low-down on American-Iranian engagement. Relations between the two countries are cold, he says, because it’s been decades since they have held a continuing dialogue at the national level.

That partially explains why the State Department’s efforts to reach out to Iranian citizens over the Internet are so vital to President Obama’s foreign policy. In the Obama administration’s dual-track policy on Iran, the U.S. is keeping pressure on the Iranian government while extending a diplomatic olive branch of peace to Iranian citizens.