As Arab regimes struggle with demonstrations fueled by Twitter and Al Jazeera, and U.S. diplomats try to understand the impact of WikiLeaks, it is clear that this global information age will require a more sophisticated understanding of how power works in world politics.

Joseph Nye coined the term "soft power," but he says that strategy alone is no longer enough. In The Future of Power, Nye explains that in the global information age, superpowers need a "smart power" strategy — the hard power of coercion and payment, plus the soft power of persuasion and attraction.

The advance of China and the multidimensional strategic challenge that it poses are most effectively characterized by one of the most loosely defined and misunderstood buzzwords in the modern parlance: soft power.

Foreign policy wonks love chasing the ‘Kennan Prize’—a parlour game that seeks to whittle down US foreign policy strategies to bumper-sticker size slogans. George Kennan won the first—and only—trophy when he cabled DC from the Embassy in Moscow detailing plans to contain Soviet Communisms expansion. Et voila, ‘containment’ was slapped on car fenders everywhere.

President Ma Ying-jeou says that the European Union's decision to waive visa requirements for Taiwanese visitors is the best validation of the island's soft power. The president was speaking in a meeting with Harvard University Professor Joseph Nye on Wednesday.

Taiwan's democracy and emphasis on human rights are its most effective forms of 'soft power, ' and its adherence to these values will influence China positively in the long run, Harvard professor Joseph Nye said in Taipei on Wednesday.

A century ago, the rise of Germany and the fear it created in Britain led to world war. Some analysts predict a similar fate from the rise of China and the fear that is creating in the United States.

Historian and diplomat Joseph Nye gives us the 30,000-foot view of the shifts in power between China and the US, and the global implications as economic, political and "soft" power shifts and moves around the globe.