The Tsunami Evaluation Committee, consisting of UN agencies and other NGOs, described the aid commitments as the most generous and immediately funded humanitarian response in history.

According to Hamid, even the most “moderate” Islamists “want the state to promote a basic set of religious and moral values through the soft power of the state machinery, the educational system and the media.”

The revelations about the United States' brutal torture program have damaged the country's best asset abroad.

Although the Sochi Games were by many measures a success, any global afterglow quickly dimmed a few weeks later when Russia annexed more Black Sea property: the Crimea in neighboring Ukraine.

To those pulling out their tin foil hats and claiming that Sony managed to pull one over on the planet by manufacturing this whole scandal – just remember that the thing about soft power is that you can’t always control how it goes down.

Speaking to foreign diplomats at the ‘end of the year’ reception recently in Suva, the Hon. Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ratu Inoke Kubuabola said he looked forward to working in close cooperation and partnership with the foreign envoys

Like the Chinese title 'Silk Road and the Great Wall,' the Silk Road' symbolizes the country's soft power, while the Great Wall represents the country's hard power. National prosperity must be achieved on the basis of supreme integration of hard and soft power.

How can democracies fight this ideology? People may die, but ideologies are forever. I suggest that we begin to think of the Islamic State as having soft power but with its own evil spin.