An amusing episode from my first Foreign Service posting -- in London, where, doubtless by computer error, given the ordinariness of my name, I was assigned in the early 1980s as a USIA officer -- took place in the US Embassy cafeteria, where Secret Service agents assigned to cover a high-ranking official visit were having their midday meal.

Sometime in the next few weeks, if the parties can agree on a place and date convenient to all sides, Iran and the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, known as the "P5+1," will meet for the first time since October 2009 to revive diplomacy over Iran's nuclear program.

Barack Obama, the charmer, won over India. The US President enthralled Indians by declaring that “in the years ahead, I look forward to a reformed UN Security Council that includes India as a permanent member”.

The Russian political class cringed last Wednesday morning on learning that U.S. President Barack Obama had suffered a humiliating political defeat in the mid-term elections, losing Democrat control in the House and barely hanging onto a razor-thin Democrat majority in the Senate.

Hillary Clinton, genuinely funny and admiration-generating in a stint this week with two of Australia's broadcast comics, Hamish and Andy...Barack Obama, at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, making a speech about democracy in Indonesia, and a reprise on last year's appeal to Islam -- but also daring to talk a little bit in the Bahasa Indonesia ("language of Indonesia") he heard around him as a child.

It’s a colossal shame that presidential life has no magic rewind button, for if it did—and we could whirr ourselves back to June 2009—we’d have had Barack Hussein Obama skip Pharaonic old Cairo, city of the ghastly Hosni Mubarak and a tightly coiled hatred of the West, and deliver his first major speech to a Muslim nation in Indonesia...

Now that President Barack Obama has concluded his $200 million per day trip to India (just kidding—that risible far right-wing canard has been thoroughly debunked), it’s a good moment for some initial thoughts about the soft power dimensions of the episode.

Now that President Barack Obama has concluded his $200 million per day trip to India (just kidding—that risible far right-wing canard has been thoroughly debunked), it’s a good moment for some initial thoughts about the soft power dimensions of the episode.