The U.S. government seems to have changed tack by engaging young people to find tech solutions to problems affecting the East Africa region. Previously, the U.S. government primarily used the USAID agency to pursue sustainable solutions...

A significant aspect of this engagement strategy has been to use new media and public diplomacy to express more effectively what America is and why it is carrying out the policies that it does. One outgrowth of this is the State Department's "Conversations with America" series.

While there has been much discussion over the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan, there hasn't been much of a public conversation on U.S. diplomacy there. Daniel Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations talks to Renee Montagne about diplomatic efforts in Afghanistan.

It was, indeed, a first for a US Secretary of State to visit Dzidzernagapert Armenian Memorial Monument. What was, indeed, puzzling about the visit was that it was dubbed a “private” visit by one of the most visible—public—officials in the world.

Around 1987, I noticed a funny thing about aerial photos of African villages: they look a lot like fractals, the repetitive shapes from computer graphics. Rectangular architecture had nested rectangles within; circular houses were in circles of circles, sometimes down to very small scales. A Fulbright fellowship gave me a year of travel in west and central Africa...

But no one, no matter how brilliant, can achieve the impossible. And the problem in Afghanistan is the impossibility of the mission. The United States is pursuing a nation-building strategy with counterinsurgency tactics – that is, building a nation at the barrel end of a gun.

The new American ambassador to the Philippines, Harry Thomas, is an avid sportsman. Thomas, an African-American, used to play football, track and field, softball and baseball, considered as the United States’ national sport.

Randall Lane's new book, "The Zeroes," details one of the stupidest moments in the recent history of America's efforts to engage the Arab world. Lane, a magazine industry genius, was hired to turn out a glossy magazine that would show Muslims images of the real America. Except that the real America, the Bush State Department mandated, contained no donkeys...