Overseas, U.S. prestige appeared to be a thing of the past. Policymakers and diplomats, hoping to “fix” this problem, used several ways to do so, including turning to public diplomacy (PD), a little-known, among the American public, foreign policy instrument, implemented by the United States Information Agency, established by President Eisenhower (in 1953), at the height of the Cold War, in order to counteract Soviet propaganda.

China’s growing control of the movie industry also exists downstream. AMC Theaters is owned by the Dalian Wanda group, whose board members have ties to the communist government. AMC is currently finalizing a merger with Carmike Cinemas that will make it the biggest movie chain in the United States with more than 8,000 theater screens. 

After trying many ways to confront ISIS’ campaigns on the internet to recruit Westerners, in particular Americans, the U.S. State Department launched a program that seeks “to appeal to emotion rather than logic” as The New York Times said on Friday. “Daesh deprives a woman of her voice,” reads one image that is part of a new State Department program, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. 

One option is to cut the monster at its roots. This is the strategy adopted by Hollande, calling for stepped up anti-terrorism operations in Syria and Iraq. Eradicating the source of propaganda and erasing the motivations for terrorist acts is one of the few options left when the embedded enemy cannot be identified. However, this strategy is uncertain and will take time to yield results, which means France facing up to the prospect of similar attacks in the near future.

Soft power – broadly a country’s ability to persuade other nations to cooperate without recourse to force – has long been a tool of Western foreign policy,  but in recent years Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has introduced his own much less benign variant of the initiative. 

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

Acting under directives from the central government, China's propaganda department is co-ordinating a global effort to step up its soft power outreach commensurate with its economic and political stature in the world, spending $US6.8 billion ($9.1 billion) a year to run and expand the international reach of official state-run media including Xinhua, CCTV, China Radio International and the China Daily.

Fear not the threat of any walls going up between the U.S and Mexico. Jorge Marin’s bronze wings offer a way to soar above the things that would divide the two countries. It’s a metaphorical rise, of course. Though standing in front of his identical Wings of the City sculptures in Mexico City and Denver, you get the feeling that optimism and fantasy — and a love of selfies — are unstoppable forces uniting the two countries.