The first major international conference on public diplomacy and China’s reputation in the world will take place in Beijing later this month. The event is co-sponsored by the Charhar Institute, China’s foremost public diplomacy think tank, the Clingendael Institute of the Netherlands...

Should one be surprised to hear the Ambassador of the United States telling an audience of students and influential Abu Dhabi elite that his country needed to raise its game and change their narrative in the region?...he remarked that people in the Gulf thought of the USA in military terms.

Professor Nye talked about Chinese soft power in detail. In the past decades, China published over a hundred articles on soft power and the term appeared on Chinese official language as well. He also pointed out that China has important resources...for generating soft power.

Within this transatlantic culture, soft power was offered as a complement to hard power – another means to the same end of getting our way in the world, albeit slower. Instead of armies, we actively shipped artists, products, legal systems, video games...

Author’s Note: This blog is the edited version of a speech I gave at the recent NATO conference on The Power of Soft Power.

When Joseph Nye first coined the term soft power over 20 years ago, the United States and Europe were in a different place than they are today.

Qatar’s soft power is exercised through its satellite TV station Al-Jazeera. And while some in Washington may object to its editorial slant, there is no denying that this Qatar-owned satellite TV station is equally responsible for the blossoming of the Arab Spring by bringing uncensored news to millions within the Arab world.