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.

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.

Something big is happening in China, and it started soon after the onset of the “Arab Spring” demonstrations and regime changes: the most serious and widespread wave of repression since the Tiananmen Square crackdowns 22 years ago. The spread of protest from one Arab-Islamic country to its neighbors might have seemed predictable. Less so was the effect in China.

On the economy, 62 percent of respondents agreed that China’s growing economy was good, while 25 percent disagreed, and 37 percent agreed that a growing US economy was good, while 53 percent disagreed. Somewhat similar results were recorded by a 2008 survey on soft power conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCOGA).

The timing probably couldn’t have been much worse. Almost a year to the day until the 2012 Olympics Games begin in London, the world was treated to images of rioters smashing storefronts and setting buildings ablaze in the capital and beyond.

When the first Americans to participate in people-to-people exchanges with Cuba in 7½ years leave Miami on a Marazul charter Thursday afternoon, the central Virginia couple will be aboard. They want to meet the people who go with the music and cigars, said Liane Young.

Pakistan’s use of terror as an instrument of proxy war against India is, of course, well established. And although successive Indian governments have deployed the full force of “coercive diplomacy” ... they haven’t always enjoyed enormous success.

Britain is considering disrupting online social networking such as Blackberry Messenger and Twitter during civil unrest, Prime Minister David Cameron said Thursday, a move widely condemned as repressive when used by other countries.