Asia continues to be a major focus of American diplomacy under President Donald Trump. Top officials from the administration -- including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson -- are set to underscore America's continued commitment to the geopolitically important region by soon visiting Asia.

Alice Roosevelt's 1905 journey to Japan, Korea and China is documented in rare photographs held by the Freer and Sackler Galleries....The timing of this voyage made certain that amid an 83-member diplomatic delegation including seven senators and 23 congressmen, headed by Secretary of War, future president and chief justice William Howard Taft, Alice would be a brighter star than ever. 

As the diplomatic apparatus of the United States, the State Department is directly involved in putting a friendly face on empire, concealing its underlying mechanics. Every year, more than $1 billion is budgeted for “public diplomacy,” a circumlocutory term for outward-facing propaganda. Public diplomacy explicitly aims to influence journalists and civil society, so that they serve as conduits for State Department messaging.

Negotiating a peaceful end to the Cold War was a great diplomatic achievement. A little over two decades later, however, we can see that post–Cold War diplomacy did not create a stable international system. Why did diplomacy succeed at the one task, yet fail at the other?