Three years ago—back when I was still a carefree cyberutopian—I wrote a short essay on “high-tech diplomacy” for Newsweek. That essay—by far the glibbest text I've ever written—chided American diplomats for not exploiting the immense digital soft power that a company like Amazon had to offer.

This United Nations Rio+20 Earth Summit happening now is a reminder of how little has been achieved since 1992, the last time diplomats gathered there to focus on global environmental perils. The final segment of the Rio+20 meeting opened yesterday with no coherent agenda and is likely to close tomorrow with few practical outcomes.

As a nation, we invest in and deploy SEAL teams to do very specialized, very difficult counterterrorism work. We need to adopt the same approach to the people we ask to carry out very specialized and very difficult PD functions.

As America’s relationship with Pakistan has unraveled over the past 18 months, an important debate has been going on within the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad over the proper scope of CIA covert actions and their effect on diplomatic interests.

The Walk a Mile campaign combines two causes that Michelle Kwan is passionate about - promoting healthy living and cultural understanding into one global platform for good.

His Royal highness Prince Faisal bin Al Hussein said that it is more than twenty two years since the fall of Berlin wall that marked the end of the cold war, and raised the hopes for a better, safe and secure future for our people.

A Bite of China, a hit documentary focused on Chinese cuisine, is reaching out across the ocean and attracting fans in Japan.

I like to call it public diplomacy, as it includes culture, media, education, economic engagement, including almost every important gamut that we have. I hope we can at the end say that India is Indonesia’s partner of choice.