Our diplomacy must be more nimble–setting priorities, forming coalitions around shared values and interests, and working assiduously to maintain the broad appeal of the international order. 

So, where does the power of the NDB lie? Precisely in its limited, yet politically powerful, BRICS membership. Its lessened economic power is compensated for by its vast soft power, merely by the fact of limiting its membership to the founding BRICS members.

The people who took part in the Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History campaigns are still there. They haven’t gone away. The calculation, however, is that there are no votes in development - which is why, when the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank meet in Washington later this week, the talks will not impinge on the election campaign. George Osborne and Ed Balls will be looking to see how they can exploit what the IMF says about the health of the UK economy for domestic political reasons, but that’s about it.

The U.S. may have mastered the notion of soft power. But if there is one thing we can say about the world’s No. 2 economy it is this: those guys in China sure know how to imitate. China’s proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is soft power at it best.

China has dramatically scaled up its global loan book over the past five years by dealing with countries largely ignored by Western lenders, whether for political reasons (Russia) or economic (Argentina).