The revival of Cambodia’s rich and unique cultural heritage has fueled the country’s impressive recovery from the Khmer Rouge’s genocide of 1975-79. This message rang unmistakably true as the Season of Cambodia (SOC) has dazzled New York audiences in museums, universities, galleries, and performing arts centers over the past month.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to China this week seeking more trade with the world’s second-biggest economy. While his hosts welcomed the overture, they were focused on the Middle East peace process.

The revival of Cambodia’s rich and unique cultural heritage has fueled the country’s impressive recovery from the Khmer Rouge’s genocide of 1975-79. This message rang unmistakably true as the Season of Cambodia (SOC) has dazzled New York audiences in museums, universities, galleries, and performing arts centers over the past month.

A perennial question about public diplomacy is, “Does it work?” Congress quite rightly asks that whenever budgets are being scrutinized, and public diplomacy practitioners do their best to provide definitive answers. This can be difficult because only a late harvest will discover all the fruit of public diplomacy. Student exchange programs, for example, may have greatest effect decades later, when the former students have become government officials.

Like many developing countries, the Philippines is seeing sustained growth, thanks in part to remittances from overseas Filipino workers. That’s why for Juan Dayang Jr., he and the rest of the Philippine diplomatic community should make it a priority to ensure the welfare and rights of these workers.

I think Syria is a humanitarian disaster of increasingly enormous proportions -- there have been probably 100,000 killed or missing, 1.4 million pushed outside of Syria, notably in huge refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan, and we probably have one million internally displaced. From a NATO perspective, our first concern is protecting the border of the alliance -- the Turkish border along the north of Syria. We deployed Patriot missiles there, and they are currently protecting millions of Turkish citizens.

The cyber war between China and the U.S. has spread from computers into the halls of diplomacy. In a report this week, the Pentagon said for the first time that the Chinese government and military have been launching cyber attacks against the U.S. Today, Chinese state media called the U.S "the real hacking empire" and said the country has "an extensive espionage network."

There are about 20km (12 miles)—and lots of checkpoints—between the official residence in Jerusalem of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and the headquarters in Ramallah of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. This week, as both leaders made simultaneous official visits to China, care was taken to keep a much greater distance between them. Their itineraries put them in different cities at all times.