Gifts in the forms of dance and films and literature are coming from Spain and Japan... It is truly interesting to see these two countries make use of soft diplomacy, as cultural exchanges and presentations are sometimes described.

Yes, I’ve read the mixed reviews about the USA Pavilion at the Shanghai 2010 Expo. The major complaint as I understand it is that the pavilion is too commercial – that it does not promote US values and society to the degree it should.

“We are not a member of the E.U., but we are a European country.” So spoke President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia in an interview with Western journalists last week, on the eve of the G-20 summit and a key meeting with President Barack Obama in Toronto. His words are worth thinking about.

It is the friendship Western policymakers wish they could have prevented: Turkey- secular, Western-leaning, and a key member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - drawing close to a resurgent theocratic Iran whose nuclear program and geopolitical ambitions present a full-frontal challenge to the established international order.

American exceptionalism, when it runs rampant, is a tsunami to be avoided. The oil company BP is discovering that right now. The environmental disaster destroying seaside communities around the Gulf of Mexico and killing off marine life is a globally important tragedy. BP has to take its sizeable share of the blame. So, presumably, should the American companies like Transocean and Halliburton, which were part of this doomed enterprise. But their nationality seems to have let them off the hook.

When Barack Obama was running for President in 2008, he wanted, first and foremost, to be different from George W. Bush who was despised by a large majority of people everywhere on this planet.

Do we care what the world thinks of us? Should we? A new survey of global opinion is getting the usual respectful attention. The Pew Global Attitudes Project surveyed people in 57 countries and found that President Obama's approval ratings have slipped a bit among Europeans, Latin Americans, and Asians -- though he remains quite a bit more popular than George W. Bush was in his final year in office.

Let's not get misty-eyed about a new age of Sino-American cooperation here. The Chinese moved on their currency as much for their own inflation-fighting self-interest as out of any concern for U.S. wishes, and they are moving slowly in any case. And one can argue that the Chinese did the minimum necessary, and belatedly, on Iran sanctions.