American intelligence analysts, like most U.S. observers, have often referred to the process unfolding in the Middle East as the “Arab Spring,” with its implicit message of democratic birth and freedom.

"We know nothing about the form of future tragedy," German playwright Botho Strauss once wrote. But that isn't true any longer. Now we can picture the form of our tragedy -- all we have to do is watch it on YouTube. The images of the London riots are a preview of our future.

A trained opera singer, he is one of 20 young foreign vocalists in Beijing this summer to learn how to sing opera in a new language: Mandarin. It's a daunting task that culminated Thursday night with a performance at the National Center for Performing Arts...

US vice president Joe Biden isn’t having an easy time... with the public diplomacy involved in this week’s visit to Beijing. First, his opening remarks at a key meeting with Xi Jinping...were interrupted by a kerfuffle involving Chinese officials and journalists covering the trip.

Polling for self-understanding. Opinion research has the role of giving the entire society, and groups within it, a better understanding of their cultural identities and where they stand on various issues. Opinion research consistently finds that familiarity breeds, not contempt, but appreciation.

Four hundred foreign students complained to the State Department that the Hershey chocolate company abused a foreign-exchange program to put them to work packing chocolate and stashed them in overpriced company housing that leaves them only $40 to $140 for a week's work.

The move has been closely coordinated with European, Turkish and Arab allies and would come one day after al-Assad told the head of the United Nations that military and police operations against anti-government protesters have stopped...

The incidental influence that the United States exerts simply through people around the world observing its behavior is consistently underestimated, just as the influence the United States can exert intentionally by exercising its economic, military, or other instruments of hard power tends to be overestimated.