Can Turkey play a role in the Arab Spring?... Yes, because Turkey has developed newfound soft power in the Middle East. Over the past decade, Ankara has painstakingly built influence in the region by fostering business networks and establishing state-of-the-art high schools to educate the future Arab elite.

But today an op-ed appeared which made it quite clear that anybody who messes with China’s dignity should expect a flaming bag of cat hurled in the general direction of their front door sometime in the very near future....This is China at its soft power worst, scoring goals in its own net and making it exponentially harder to convince the rest of the world that the country is being run by grown-ups.

When a recent survey indicated that 80 percent of Indonesians believe their nation can become a superpower, it was more a reflection of growing nationalist sentiment in a country that is striving to maintain its independence from the current global contest between the United States and China.

The term "Cool Japan" was a localized take on the UK's "Cool Britannia" idea of the 1990s. The idea of "Cool Japan" was centered on the country's position as a rising soft power superpower. Soft power is the culture influence countries have, while hard power is the influence from political, military, or economic power.

Alexis-Marchay Karklins, co-leader of the center of emerging markets at Ernst & Young, said that “recent trends have made the deployment and use of soft power crucial and it is not surprising that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) dominate this index.