Nowadays, propagandists fight an unorthodox war: no bloodshed, no artillery and surely no soldiers. The media is the weapon, journalists are the soldiers, the target is the viewer’s mind and the bullets are news bulletins and entertainment programs. The mass media have becomethe platforms through which twenty-first century wars are fought. Countries no longer colonize by means of the gun. Now they colonize by means of the satellite disk.

Despite its wealth, Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is “inward looking.” Gerges also described Iran as a failed model and a dysfunctional system both ideologically and politically.
According to Gerges, for the countries in the Arab world, the only two models are the governance of the AK Party and Europe. Turkey can do “a great deal” with its soft power, he believes.

Qatar has become an example of peaceful co-existence within a multi-cultural society that hosts a large number of nationalities, a senior security official has said. As a clear indicator of this, Qatar assumed a leading position – for the fourth consecutive year - in the Global Peace Index (GPI) 2012 for Middle East and North Africa (Mena) - Qatar got the first position at the Arab level and 12th internationally, he said.

For nearly two hundred years the measure of a nation’s progress has been its capacity to Westernize. Today, to a great extent, China has shifted this narrative. In the last three decades, China has lifted over 500 million of its people out of poverty according to the World Bank. The scale and speed of China’s growth are unprecedented. The world has never seen anything like the rise of China according to Martin Jacques, author of bestseller ‘When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order.’

The anti-American protests raging across the Middle East and beyond are testing much more than the security at America's diplomatic missions, or even the ability of Arab leaders—many of them in nascent democracies—to address extremism.

Dozens of disappointing Pew polls later, with the United States government having earmarked vast sums of money for public diplomacy, you have to wonder whether Washington hasn’t run up a blind alley in its desire to be popular among Arabs. An obscure Israeli-American real estate developer in California uploads a video condemning the Prophet Mohammad, and mobs storm the American consulate in Benghazi, killing an ambassador.

Turkey has brilliantly managed to attract and lure in the Arabs by capitalizing on its ‘Soft Power.’ It has influenced and won over the Arab psyche by producing very successful TV dramas that won over the viewers’ hearts and presenting them with a dreamy image of Turkey.