The Foreign Ministry last week opened its first “virtual embassy” – a Twitter account through which it hopes to conduct a dialogue with the people of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain. The new account is called Israel in the GCC – the Gulf Cooperation Council, an umbrella group for every Arab state in the Gulf except Iraq. These six Sunni Arab countries have a mutual interest with Israel: coping with the Iranian nuclear threat.

Every government bureaucracy on the face of the Earth experiences turf wars, morale issues, infighting and red tape. Then there's the State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs. Best known as the bureau that blew $630,000 on Facebook "likes," IIP finds itself at a crossroads, sources tell The Cable, as it prepares to announce a new coordinator next month.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has warned that US was "not trustworthy", after former US officials and legislators urged diplomacy with Iran’s incoming president Hassan Rowhani. “I said at the beginning of the (Iranian) year that I am not optimistic about negotiations with the US, though in the past years I did not forbid negotiating (with US) about certain issues like Iraq,” he said on Sunday during an “Iftar” party meal that breaks the daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

After having served for three-and-a-half years as the US Ambassador to the Asian Development Bank under presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush, I finally made my first trip to Myanmar last April, to Mandalay, as a private citizen. In early July I returned, landing in Yangon two days before US Independence Day.

Last month’s U.S.-India strategic dialogue in New Delhi was widely viewed as a failure. As Ambassador T.P. Sreenivasan, a former Indian diplomat, put it, “The India-US Strategic dialogue, by all accounts, accomplished little….

In a July 15 Roll Call opinion piece, “Don’t Devalue Exchange Programs in Immigration Reform,” Michael Petrucelli argues that the Senate immigration bill was wrong to include basic labor protections for the more than 100,000 student guestworkers who come to the U.S. each year through the J-1 visa program. Petrucelli argues that these workers aren’t really workers, but cultural exchange participants, and that the J-1 Exchange Visitor program isn’t really a guestworker program, but a tool of public diplomacy.

The scandal caused a decline in American soft power. After the presidency of George W. Bush, Barack Obama incarnated the promise of a new, value-oriented America, a promise for which he received – rather prematurely – the Nobel Peace Prize. Five years later, the PRISM affair has dealt a heavy blow to Obama's – and America's – reputation, which was already dented by the unresolved question of the Guantanamo detainees and Obama's secret drone war.

For more than a decade, American public diplomacy has centered around Joseph Nye’s soft power approach. This approach is based on the assumption that nations can win global hearts and minds of foreign citizens by highlighting the attractiveness of its culture, political values, and foreign policy. To this end, public diplomacy officials have allocated billions of dollars into a variety of soft power programs such as cultural and educational exchanges, foreign aid and development, and English language instruction.