Rather than focusing on meaningful strategy, Washington's policy elites appear to have spent the past decade obsessed with finding a winning narrative. Grand strategy should be about connecting ends and means on a global scale that transcends administrations and their peculiar obsessions and preoccupations, whether it be Iraq, Afghanistan, or China...In all cases, it still lacks a coherent vision grounded in a realistic grand strategy.

The ways that humans communicate with each other are diversifying and changing rapidly. Some people think if a golden era when Voice of America was on shortwave radio and there were the huddled masses listening and then looking for the secret police to knock on the door and hide the radio. That's not where we're at now.

“The relationships forged through operations like Continuing Promise fosters trust, collaboration, and cooperation with our friends and allies,” Nickerson said, adding the mission “also be characterized as defense support to public diplomacy...

Day to day public diplomacy deals with particular groups, networks and individuals but it is also important to keep the big picture in mind. That big picture is not just the overall image of the country but the image of the preferred international order.

Improbably, I was in Calgary, another stage in the campaign of public diplomacy on which I had embarked shortly after my arrival in Canada five months before - explaining to Canadians how the United States regarded the changing world and how it regarded Canada's place in that new world.

Two Pakistani journalists filing reports home from Washington are quietly drawing their salaries from US State Department funding through a nonprofit intermediary, highlighting the sophisticated nature of America’s efforts to shape its image abroad.

"Soft power", which mainly comprises values, systems, political views and cultural influence, is being increasingly emphasized by various countries around the globe...This has given rise to public diplomacy, which is considered an important means of developing soft power.

Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States ten years ago was a profound shock to both American and international public opinion... Anyone who flies or tries to visit a Washington office building gets a reminder of how American security was changed by 9/11