With the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) reaching the end of their lifespan, attention now turns to September's launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the UN General Assembly. Although the MDGs were partly successful, the consensus is that the world appears to have changed so much in the past 15 years that many of the assumptions and approaches are no longer relevant.

Much of American public diplomacy, like much of the rest of U.S. foreign policy, is reactive. When a crisis erupts, policymakers respond as best they can to limit the damage. In this social media era, they are often outpaced by those who are better prepared to use new communication tools to deliver their messages.

The discourse surrounding drone strikes in the FATA region has always been complex. At least, that is what the New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen said recently, a revelation that was backed by a statement from an unnamed official in Islamabad. With a sharp decline in the number of drone strikes from 2010 onwards, and no strikes at all so far in 2014, it seems as if the Obama administration, ahead of a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2016, has finally decided to wrap up the CIA drone campaign in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA.