On July 8-9, 2016, some of the world’s most powerful heads of state, as well as their foreign and defense ministers, gathered in Warsaw for the NATO Summit. NATO summits, convened every year or two, represent important public diplomacy opportunities for the Alliance. During these summits, NATO nations and partners meet in order to produce a communiqué, which outlines the Alliance’s priorities and initiatives. 

A year after the State Department opened a data center in the Middle East aimed at countering Islamic State’s online messaging, the U.S. plans to inaugurate a similar outpost in Malaysia in coming months. Like its counterpart in the United Arab Emirates, the new center will seek to undermine the terrorist group’s digital recruitment and propaganda efforts

Experts told lawmakers on June 23 that new approaches are needed to counter the Islamic State in cyberspace [...] the State Department's efforts to counter the message by the terrorist group is "inadequate" and "falls on deaf ears," mainly because it has the State Department logo attached to everything and therefore is easily ignored as government work. The public diplomacy efforts, he added,  "have really been pretty much a bust, dysfunctional."

Anticipating criticism about including a country like Russia in the top-30, the report’s authors claimed that Moscow’s role in combatting ISIS – as well as the fact that it didn’t advance its position any further into Ukraine – appeared to help international perception. “Russia performed markedly better on the international polling in 2016, compared with 2015,” the report’s authors noted.

In February of last year, Islamic State militants stormed the Mosul Museum in Iraq with drills and sledgehammers in hand. [...] Fourteen months later and 5,800 miles away, that lion was resurrected for an evening in a seventh-floor gallery at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. It wasn’t the only destroyed artifact from the Mosul Museum on display