“While this trip was monumental in itself with the partnerships that were developed, this year marks another special moment in the history of the Confucius Institute at WKU,” Martin said. “This year marks the official first full year of the summer camps provided by the Confucius Institute at WKU.”

Fundamentally, public diplomacy needs to be about more than explaining American policies to the world, explaining American ideals or telling foreigners about how the United States is a great country. It needs to demonstrate to foreign publics that their concerns, desires, aspirations and opinions are relevant to America.

While still evolving at incredible speed, the current use of social media is a dramatic step in the right direction that can help make the counterinsurgent successful at providing truthful information to the public before the insurgent can distort the perception of the event.

The mass and velocity of tweets, Facebook posts and even blog posts surrounding the Olympics have been extraordinarily high. But, if you analyze the content, you'll see that the high volume conversations are focused mostly on interesting stories.

As one of 40 US graduate students in the 2012 Sino-US Young Professionals in Science and Engineering Exchange Program, Campbell will spend two months conducting his study at Tsinghua University in Beijing...It aims to improve academic and cultural exchange between young professionals from China and the US.

He explained that the training was designed to create awareness on the need to speak indigenous languages and create a sense of pride in them thereby fostering national pride and identity; encourage the need to preserve indigenous languages; and promote Nigeria's cultural diplomacy objectives.

According to the State Department, the first project, known as 'Networks of Diasporas in Engineering and Science' (NODES), "seeks to leverage existing collaborations while facilitating and supporting a variety of new collaborations" between diasporas in the United States.

The North Vietnamese victory was largely made possible by the United States failing to provide timely and accurate reports to the media. “Even worse,” writes Hammes, “the government had squandered its credibility with the press and through them, with the U.S. public.”