The Arab Spring has diminished Iran's ability to wield soft power in the region. Instead, the momentum has shifted to Turkey, which has not been shy about stealing pages from the Iranian playbook for appealing to the Arab street.

There is something fundamentally wrong with US public diplomacy when it comes to Pakistan. Our most distinguished frequent diplomatic interlocutors from Washington are not State Department officials but hardcore senior officials and military commanders...

The U.S. and Thailand should expand their relationship to fully enable a new era of security cooperation, trade, promotion of shared values, and public diplomacy cooperation, building on the U.S. embassy’s role as a nexus for regional relations.

As this laundry list of objectives indicates, it appears that the US is approaching terrorism in Africa from many different perspectives. Mirroring America’s foreign policy, however, the TSCTP places too much emphasis on hard rather than soft power.

The war in Libya and the activities of three Africa-based Islamist groups have raised questions about whether Africom may be shifting from its initial posture of projecting soft power to one of managing a hot theater. However...while Africom's public affairs posture may now be in flux, the command's core mission of growing African capabilities to meet African security challenges has not changed.

While U.S. military and economic hegemony may decline, it does not follow that American filmmakers -- or other agents of culture-making -- will lose global influence at the same time. America has... taken its advantages in money and power and linked them to the creation of cultural forms that have broad appeal to people worldwide.

America's adversaries are not really most afraid of its military or even economic power. They are most afraid of its moral power...America's greatest natural resource and comparative advantage is its dynamic, multicultural society drawn together by a unifying concept...But, the way we approach the world through our foreign and national security policies is woefully inappropriate and counterproductive.

Either Europeans will develop the security and defense identity they have advertised for so long, so Europe can have its own credible voice in a world not only run by soft power, or given the expense and difficulties of defeating even Libya, they will simply stop trying. The jury is out, but the verdict is important.