To make things worse, Europe’s self-proclaimed soft-power leadership—which some observers praise as complementing U.S. hard power in a supposed informal division of labor—has reached its limits. Europeans failed to foresee and contain trouble in their own backyards, East and South alike.

But fearing that the West wants to prosecute their leader, Kim Jong Un, for human rights abuses, North Korean officials are beginning to rely on soft words instead of hard power.

Harun Yahya in this opinion piece advocates that Turkey should always be on the side of diplomacy, soft-power, and effectively administer an intellectual struggle to defeat the opponents that resort to violence and persecution. 

Russian propaganda, often masquerading as legitimate news, is disseminated through state-controlled media to confuse, obscure, and shift the debate about Putin and to legitimize Russian aggression abroad.

The most prominent strategy for how to counter an insurgency is “to win hearts and minds.  Once the battle for popular opinion is won, they will provide the government with the information it needs to effectively prosecute these wars and the insurgency, starved of support, will wither away.

It is often said that "doing nothing is not an option". It always is, and it is sometimes the best option. As the forces of Isis continue their murderous, genocidal and misogynistic advance in Iraq, it is an option that should be seriously considered. In the end, however, only 43 MPs voted against the "something" that the Prime Minister proposed on Friday.

As Indian athletes get ready to compete in Incheon today few remember how the modern Asian Games themselves were virtually invented by India, how central these Games were for the hopes, aspirations and ideals of Nehruvian India and the role they played in soft power diplomacy in the early years after independence.