NATO has a public diplomacy department staffed with smart and dedicated people, but it became apparent at a conference on “The Power of Soft Power,” held recently in Brussels, that this contingent is increasingly lonely.

BRUSSELS --- Since its founding in 1949, NATO has been a bastion of hard power, first as an alliance arrayed against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, and more recently as a manifestation of Western muscle in conflicts such as Kosovo in 1999 and Libya in 2011. Coming off its decisive performance in helping to end the rule of Muammar Qaddafi, NATO seems to be happily basking in macho glory.

“This is what I like, we are sitting here in my gallery in former East German ground, former Russian land and I now have visitors from all over the world and the theme is peace, togetherness, freedom, anti-racism. I feel when I have such tools and I have such guests here, like you, that my work makes sense.”

On the whole, foreign investors find India an excellent investment opportunity that relates to the arena of “needs and wants” marketing, as opposed to “desires and aspirations” marketing. For the latter, China is an excellent destination, and not India.

A need to engage with industry on an equal plane while Indian industry, too, stops crawling when asked to walk....If we don’t get any of the above done, GDP growth notwithstanding, the reputational damage we would have caused Brand India will be immeasurable. So someone needs to wake up and pretty soon at that.

Shared identity is unsustainable without incorporating culture and sports under the European umbrella, and football might prove to be one of the highest hurdles to jump on the road to Europeanization.

Steven W. Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute (PRI) and a renowned China expert, will testify before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs today on the subject of the various "Confucius Institutes" being put in place all over the United States. These institutes... represent a significant threat to U.S. national security and an attempt to enhance China's "soft power" globally.

BRICS, grouping Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has set a distinctive example of great powers rising with "soft power," said Boris Martynov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Latin America Institute.