Dilma doing a cameo in a Spike Lee joint, and spotlighting human rights violations. Lula rolls out a new Facebook page and gets tagged at an arts crawl with Dilma. It's all part of the cultural public diplomacy designed to make those who say "they don't care about us" say Go Brazil, Go! before the World Cup and the Rio Olympics.

I previously described the conference I attended -- the Istanbul World Political Forum -- as an illustration of Turkey's emphasis on "soft power." By creating a Davos-like annual meeting oriented towards issues central to emerging economies, the organizers sought to display Turkey's growing importance as a political player

The priciest public-relations expenditure was the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which by some estimates cost $40 billion. The country has financed roads in Brazil, bridges in Zambia, power grids in Cambodia and mining rigs in Uzbekistan. It established Confucius Institutes for Chinese language and culture on 75 US college campuses. It started CCTV America to raise its profile.

Despite moving in the right direction, the entire ordeal demonstrates just how incompetent Pakistan's government is when dealing with international crises, such as the NATO strikes, and how an emotional response, coupled with a poor understanding of bargaining power, can cripple a nation's international soft power and reputation.

The row is symptomatic of Turkish anxiety that the country's rising "soft power", based on a booming economy and relative democratic stability ushered in by Erdogan after a long era of military coups, could be threatened by a nascent "Shi'ite axis" embodied by Iran and Maliki's Tehran-backed Baghdad government.

The most-populous nation has been throwing tens of billions of dollars at its prestige deficit for a decade, all part of an effort to enhance China’s soft power, something of which the U.S., for all its crises, has a surplus.