Tehran faces a classic case of mission creep: It is being forced to commit ever-greater military and financial resources in Syria, falling deeper into the Syrian quagmire with no clear exit strategy. After four years of war, Assad’s forces are overstretched, the regime’s Alawite base is demoralized, and the Syrian economy is in a free-fall.

Speaking at a Brookings Institution event in Washington, Schaeuble described the standoff with Russian President Vladimir Putin as a "new systemic conflict" that would be won by the side with greater "soft power" and a stronger economy.

Britain is paying professional aid staff up to £1,000 a day to work in developing countries as part of a spending "frenzy" to meet a government target, a new report suggestst. Spending on consultants has doubled in the past four years to £1.4bn with the bill for outside help now eating up more than 10 per cent of the aid budget. The figures prompted anger among MPs, who described the practice as a "grotesque waste".

With the majority of radical websites and social media messages hosted on servers in the United States, US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel yesterday found himself defending America’s stance of upholding the freedoms of religion and expression, including “the speech that we hate”, in response to questions on why the US authorities are not doing more to clamp down on such communications.

After a decade of swimming against the tide, the Australian Government is slowly engaging in the world of digital diplomacy. (...) Today, digital diplomacy is a foreign policy essential. We live in a world where state and non-state entities all compete for influence and power in the same online space. 

Moscow State University’s Faculty of Political Science and the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of International Studies will soon begin academic exchanges within the framework of the cooperation agreement signed in October 2014, among the first between the leading Russian and Indian universities.

Is the UK's role on the world stage a decades-long story of managed decline, including the orderly withdrawal from a once vast empire? Or is it the story of a medium-sized power whose standing in the world reflects the new global reality?

Peng Liyuan, the celebrity wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping, has played a key role in successfully projecting the Communist giant's soft power abroad through her public diplomacy, according to a study on the country's first lady.