At face value, Qatar’s engagement with the world is impressive. Doha has not only cultivated a strong alliance with the United States as the host of U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) and extended overtures to Israel, but until recently the tiny emirate truly also competed with its larger neighbor—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—for a dominant role in the Sunni Arab world.

Piracy, the scourge of Hollywood, may have become one of America's powerful diplomatic tools – is it the new propaganda? [...] "The last thing they think is that it [pirated movies] represents a tool of cultural diplomacy, involving a foreign culture or government, and that its illegality could even make this mainstream fare more alluring than originally planned.”

With migration tearing at the EU’s cohesion, politicians are linking foreign policy to strategic interests rather than democracy and human rights. Will 2015 be seen as the year that the European diplomacy got realpolitik? With migration tearing at the cohesion of the European Union, more politicians have started to see the bloc’s foreign policy as a way to secure Europe’s strategic interests, shifting away from the EU’s traditional focus on democracy and human rights.

The idea of soft war seems to be a counterargument for Joseph Nye’s theory of Soft Power. This article tries to look at the two ideas and find how they are applied in US policies towards the Middle East. The idea of soft power and its implications in foreign policy are discussed first using Nye’s and other researchers works; and further, the idea of soft war is reviewed by going through excerpts from Ayatollah Khamenei’s speeches and remarks.

Painting a sanguine outlook for China’s endeavors to enhance soft power, Kim Heung-kyu, political science professor at Ajou University, said that China might be “actively” seeking to utilize its soft power diplomacy including public diplomacy as a tool to expand its influence well beyond East Asia.

Andrew K Rose estimates that a 1% net increase in ‘soft power’ raises exports by around .8%.  Do countries do well by doing good? More precisely, does a country admired by others reap any benefit? My research indicates that the answers to these questions is “yes” and “yes”. I have taken advantage of a quantitative measure of soft power to show that a country sells more exports to nations that perceive it to be a force for good, holding other factors constant. 

When US President Barack Obama recently spoke at the United Nations about countering the Islamic State, many of his critics complained that he put too much emphasis on diplomacy and not enough on the use of force. It is more accurate to see the current mood as a swing of the US foreign policy pendulum between what Columbia University’s Stephen Sestanovich has called “maximalist” policies and “retrenchment” policies.

China with a growing economy and military power has started to become a serious threat for United States of America, as there are several reports indicating that Beijing is involved in covert operations against White House through a soft power strategy that Washington never thought would be used against it to such good effect.