It’s a colossal shame that presidential life has no magic rewind button, for if it did—and we could whirr ourselves back to June 2009—we’d have had Barack Hussein Obama skip Pharaonic old Cairo, city of the ghastly Hosni Mubarak and a tightly coiled hatred of the West, and deliver his first major speech to a Muslim nation in Indonesia...

Israel’s public image today is dismal. As Elie Wiesel once joked, “Jews excel in just about every profession except public relations, but this should not surprise us: when God wanted to free the Jews from Egypt he sent Moses, who stuttered.” However, today Israel’s problem is not that its leaders are stuttering, rather that they are stalling to show leadership toward ending the Arab-Israeli conflict. In doing so, they are sending a message to the international community that Israel does not care what the world thinks, and that it does not want peace after all.

Now that President Barack Obama has concluded his $200 million per day trip to India (just kidding—that risible far right-wing canard has been thoroughly debunked), it’s a good moment for some initial thoughts about the soft power dimensions of the episode.

But today it's worth stepping back and offering some praise. The administration has stuck with the president's clear commitment to restoring positive relations with the Muslims of the world despite all the setbacks, when it would have been really easy to give up or change course.

Judith McHale is currently the US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. She spoke to Gulf News during a visit to Dubai, after giving an address at the two-day Celebration of Entrepreneurship event on Tuesday.

Last night on "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart focused his attention on President Obama's post-midterm election trip to India, where he secured 22,000 jobs for Americans and did some pretty laughable dancing with school children in Mumbai.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat down with an Australian comedic duo for an interview that aired Tuesday, in which she appeared to to be concerned about the world's image of Americans and the nation's collective lifestyle.

The relationship between public diplomacy and nation branding is not always clear. I get the impression that a lot of PD practitioners and academics like to draw a clear division even though there are many overlaps between the activities.