Hoffman contends that Israel’s foreign policy is in urgent need of a structural overhaul in order to deal with the challenges of public diplomacy. He is currently formulating an action plan that would redefine the authority granted by law to Israel’s foreign-affairs and public-diplomacy activities.

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/06/israeli-foreign-minist...

Commission development aid should be used primarily for maintaining progress towards the MDGs, not for strategic or foreign policy reasons. The European External Action Service must be involved in development aid decisions, since aid is a powerful means of extending the EU’s ‘soft power’. But the decisions should continue to be taken by the Commission itself.

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Nearly 67 years ago, the American diplomat George F. Kennan laid out the strategic framework that would define the towering rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. We came to know it as the Cold War — as real and in some ways as dangerous as a hot war, an overshadowing, winner-take-all ideological conflict juxtaposing communism and democratic capitalism, played out through diplomacy and small-scale conflicts in lieu of the unimaginable alternative: total nuclear conflagration.

Some of the latest innovations on display included paper USBs, translation tools and mobile crisis intervention projects. Focal topics included use of social media, mobile phones and innovative tools for exchanging content with audiences, and tools for getting information into press-restrictive societies such as Cuba, Syria and China.

Within the framework of the Public Diplomacy Mission “Everyone is going to Yerevan”, over 40 cultural events are being held in Yerevan and regions started June 12, including concerts, exhibitions, theater plays by artists from the former Soviet republics.

“Communications technology has dramatically democratized the process of gaining a public audience,” said journalist and former military analyst Joshua Foust at a Washington forum on digital diplomacy.

China will almost certainly pass the United States in the total size of its economy within a decade or so. But if one looks also at military and "soft power" resources, the United States is likely to remain more powerful than China for at least the next few decades. Does it matter?