The Qatar Foundation sponsors Barcelona football club, a reminder that in 10 years' time it will play host to the World Cup. Then there is the Doha-based al-Jazeera television, considered the most important Arab news TV channel, owned by Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation—which last week claimed that it had evidence that the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was poisoned with polonium.

The Chinese military clearly recognized that the U.S. was able to gain substantial goodwill from its effective response to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami with its aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships ferrying supplies, medical teams and rescue crews ashore, according to Chinese and Western commentators.

It is soft power that will to a large extent make or unmake superpowers of the future. China and India are the obvious candidates to be considered as the future superpowers. India will have to pit itself against the might of the Chinese economic machine.

Pentagon officials talk about “demilitarizing” US foreign policy, which one can understand after the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the conventional wisdom now puts too much weight on “soft” power. We should not overestimate how much the world loves us because of our virtues, nor underestimate how much our influence still depends on hard power and our ability to provide protection in a pinch.

We know India’s military prowess but ignore its soft power: India has hosted the Asian Games twice, the 2010 Commonwealth Games and the Cricket World Cup in 2011 along with Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Bollywood is the world’s largest film industry and in 2009 alone produced 2,961 films.

The main theme was that Cairo speech carried a reconciliatory tone, different from the arrogance of the Bush administration, and meant America will rely more on ‘soft power’ rather than ‘military power’.

The speech and doctrine was far less grounded in a liberal illusion of Obama as a cosmopolitan-in-chief. His public diplomacy on this trip was meant less to reassure and more to make plain America’s intent to augment its hard military power in Australia’s backyard. His believe in the efficacy of hard power is one of the most underappreciated aspect of his presidency.