So much World Service discussion habitually worries about cuts to inherited structures, but here was a bracing counter-blast: never mind soft power; now let’s make all the hard choices that help us, not Whitehall.

The Ethiopian Public diplomacy team has achieved its objectives. The Egyptian President Al-Sisi said, Ethiopia has every right to development and utilization of the Nile Waters.

The Cuba announcement is the latest example of “soft power,’’ much ridiculed in an age of terrorism, religious extremism and regional warfare. It’s a policy that taps nonmilitary advantages such as technology, financial power and open institutions to push American ideals. 

The idea of Russian “soft power” became fashionable, but it was very different to European “soft power”. So-called Russian soft power was just “softer power”, including any means of coercion not involving tanks. It was, in the English phrase, “softly-softly” power, or “covert power”, the type of behind-the-scenes influence encapsulated in the Russian phrase kuluarna polityka – politics in corridors, not just away from public influence, but without formal record.

There is a disconnect between China’s growing national power and the international image of the Chinese people.

He presides over a one-party state that jails more journaliststhan any other on the planet, silences its critics ruthlessly and censors the Internet extensively. But China’s President Xi Jinping is not only wildly popular in his own country, he could be the most popular world leader globally.

When I introduced the word Moroccanism to academia, I was thinking of a unifying cultural concept that can bring all the Moroccans together whether they consider themselves African, Amazigh, Arab, Hebrew, Mediterranean or Andalusian.